Client Profile
Founded in 1973, the global consultancy giant works with almost 60% of Global 500 companies, nonprofits and startups to address industry-defining challenges in strategy, marketing, operations, digital transformation and sustainability. Operating out of 59 offices in 37 countries, the firm’s integrated services and solutions help clients across the manufacturing, defense, automotive, healthcare, infrastructure, retail and telecommunications space achieve breakthrough results.
Business Need.
This consultancy firm was approached by a leading e-commerce brand to strategize the smooth launch of a new range of fashion and lifestyle products in the Asian market. They were in need of a competitive pricing strategy to get an accurate estimate of similar product matching and near real-time pricing updates. Existing data with the ecommerce company was neither comprehensive nor current enough for creating a pricing strategy.
Looking at the market volatility and time-sensitivity, opting for manual market research approach for multiple product lines across geographies and brands was not feasible.
The consultancy firm approached Hitech to capture and collate pricing data from multiple e-commerce platforms for easy comparison and to set up an efficient pricing strategy for each fashion and lifestyle product, SKU-wise and location-wise.
Challenges.
- High refresh rate of price information for each product on multiple platforms.
- Uncertainty on exact volumes of products across different regions and categories.
- Huge dependency on functioning and response of different ecommerce websites while gathering data.
- Blocked IP addresses while scraping data from sensitive websites.
- Time taking task due to sudden appearance of Captcha codes during data mining.
- Less clarity and accuracy of data points gathered from non-English websites.
Solution.
We captured, scraped and compiled 1L+ price data points for personal care, skin, bath and body, hair, fragrance and premium beauty products, region-wise and SKU-wise, from multiple fashion and lifestyle websites. Our solution delivered in structured, standardized and validated format gave a comprehensive competitors’ pricing overview to the ecommerce vendor for devising optimal pricing strategy.
Approach.
- Hitech data mining specialists received and reviewed input documents in a diverse range of formats like PPTs, PDFs and spreadsheets consisting of list of products, websites, regions, categories, customer profiles etc.
- To meet massive requirement of volumes, automated web-based scraping tools were run across multiple systems over three shifts.
- Data points scraped were:
- SKU
- Brand
- Product title and price with currency
- Target gender
- Product category and segment
- Customer reviews
- Availability
- Shipping time
- Delivery regions
- Discounts
- We used custom tools to control IP address from being blocked for easy data capture and scraping.
- We designed a unique step-by-step workflow to capture exact data points from non-English websites.
- Delivered a standardized and well-categorized database consisting of price points across brands and locations within a turnaround time of 5 days for easy price point comparison.
- Software and Technology Used: Custom internet macros, scripts and Python.
Business Impact.
Validated price point data with 100 % accuracy
Enabled refined analysis of prices for launch pricing, discounts and marketing strategies
Region-based insights for pricing expectations, trends and needs to make smart pricing decisions