If there’s one pain point that is more painful for retailers than all the other pain points put together, it is the fact that they don’t get information on price changes on a timely and consistent basis. Suppliers and manufacturers may often change prices of products, or have different pricing based on region, may have introduced a new variant of the product, or even deactivated it – but news does not always reach the distributor on time. The impact of this miss can range from inconvenient to disastrous, considering that pricing changes can have significant impact on profit margins.
On similar lines, a second use case exists, which also has the potential to impact margins. Wouldn’t you like to know at what price your competitor sells a product similar to the one in your store? Wouldn’t you like to be updated on this regularly so that you can decide whether you need to make adjustments to your pricing?
dataX deploys two algorithms, Price Matching and Supplier Monitoring, to help retailers stay on top of any changes made to product data by suppliers and competitors.
As a first step, we auto-classify the supplier’s (or competitor’s) taxonomy to the retailer’s taxonomy, so that an apples-to-apples comparison can be made. Now, the monitoring can begin.
dataX algorithms scour through competitor websites, picking up all the SKUs that the retailer is also selling. The matches are highly accurate because we use attribute values for comparison, rather than GTIN or MPNs. The prices of these matching SKUs are picked up and presented in report form to the retailer periodically.
On the supplier side, dataX in addition to price monitoring, also flags for changes made to images, titles, descriptions, user manuals, warranties, installation guides, technical specifications and other product related data. We can also notify the retailer if the supplier has delisted a particular SKU, or introduced a new one, or has just released a variant of an existing product.
As a retailer, you can have effortless access to your competitor’s pricing information with the Price Monitoring algorithm. Every time your competitor changes the price of a product that you also sell, you can decide whether or not to make adjustments to your pricing.
An enormous benefit of the Supplier Monitoring module is customer satisfaction. Did your customer ask for a product variant in blue? Are you tired of chasing your supplier for a notification on this? Did your supplier just delist a product? But do you still have that on your ecommerce site? Better update it before your customer places an order! Or worse, exits the website because they didn’t find the blue variant. Worry not, timely dataX reports will keep your data current, making selling efficient and keeping your customers satisfied.
