An online marketplace, with a revenue of over US$100 million, a platform connecting building contractors, suppliers and manufacturers of home improvement products and consumers across North America.
The online merchant sold mostly heavyweight, expensive products such as building materials, kitchen and bathroom equipment, furniture, etc. and was looking to expand its market penetration across strategic locations in the continent.
The client was looking for a price intelligence solution that will help him come up with dynamic optimum pricing for 10,000 SKUs responding to any change in competitor products (price and stock).
Identifying competitors, covering relevant products and the data sources to capture product information – it was a time consuming task to identify sellers on other platforms across cities in the U.S. and Canada as well as comparable products, as names and descriptions vary a lot in many cases for different manufacturers.
Data capture and quality issues – with layout and structure varying across websites, which were frequently updated, configuring scrapers and parsing the data was a huge challenge. Further, extensive cleansing, with human intervention was required to remove quality issues.
Data accessibility issues– as lot of data on stock and product descriptions was lost behind captcha codes, in heavily embedded images, tables, frames, etc.
Market Visibility Dashboard
Dynamic Pricing Application
AI-based application which generate price points for all 10,000 SKUs, with features to include product additions, to enable subscribed sellers offer the most competitive prices, adapting to price changes in real-time.
Market research and analysis – identifying competitors, data sources, all required parameters to compile information on competitors’ products across the continent.
Automated data collection process – configuring scrapers for all competitor websites, with custom scripts for websites with complex structures (embedded data) to extract product codes, prices, stock levels, descriptions on promotions, price reductions or discounts, etc., using proxy VPN servers for dealing with captcha code issues.
Automated product segmentation module – by calculating “product similarity index” using advance machine learning methodologies on different product features along with a data cleansing and transformation module.
Real-time data aggregation via an API – in view of pricing and stock level revisions or updates across suppliers and manufacturers.
Enabled exporting of competitor product and pricing information into Excel, with options for weekly updates to incorporate revisions – covering product pricing and stock availability information across locations.
