Services

With our Direct Tracking service, automated product mapping on identical products is performed as standard where possible using industry standard identifiers (e.g. barcodes, manufacturer part numbers) or other common part numbers depending upon the competitor. We are constantly looking for new ways to help automate as much of the mapping as possible to give you the widest automated coverage available.

In addition, we are happy to implement a bespoke automated mapping algorithm based on your requirements, so if you know how to identify the correct competitor products to map to your own, we can set up some automated rules to apply.

Another option is to semi-automate the mapping task, by applying a few simple rules we can provide candidate mappings that require a simple confirmation stage for you to approve.

Suitable for: Retailer identical product tracking, large catalogues with industry standard part numbers, specific competitor sites

Where common industry part numbers are not available or not exposed, mapping your products to the equivalent (identical or comparable) competitor products presents a huge challenge. Our Advanced Mapping Console presents the best candidate suggestions across all your competitors in a single view ("multi-site mapping") with a simple tick/cross mechanism to confirm mappings and access to full product specifications with side-by-side comparison. Mappings are permanent once made and we will then perform 'Direct Tracking' on the mapped competitor products. The console is built on top of a powerful linguistic maching engine used by many leading websites, utilising the power of the engine combined with intelligent configuration and extra rules around the product set with the ability to override parameters for the greatest possible control through a single interface.

Years of experience have gone into creating the most advanced tool on the market to make the laborious and tricky job of mapping as simple as possible, delivering dynamic automated suggestions on current data, it can be operated by users with minimal trainig whilst delivering maximum flexibility to tweak the settings for those who need it. The console can be used in a number of different modes, automated or fixed suggestions, deep part number search, product 'catalogue page' comparison and the ability to submit your own suggestions . Mapping is a two stage process, where the second stage can be as simple as a couple of clicks of a mouse, or as involved as you choose to perform supervisory review to ensure quality, enabling multiple users to perform mapping activity but still deliver consistency in results.

A fully managed mapping service is also available from us as an optional extra service. With our fully managed service, we use the same mapping console to deliver the best service available, or if you want to perform your own mapping we give you full access to our tool.

Suitable for: Own brand "comparable" product mapping, competitors who don't expose part numbers, mapping variant products (i.e. tracking multiple competitor colour variations of the same product against your single product), areas where only you have the expertise to determine exactly what you want to map

If you don't need product mapping, we can collect and deliver raw data from any target website in a format to suit your requirement. This service is not limited to retail product data collection.

Suitable for: Competitor catalogue visibility, in-house processing, content analysis

You may not always want a full competitor's website collecting. In our experience, it's less common to want a full site and more usual to only need a relevant part of your competitor's range, so we tailor our collection to prevent you from being overwhelmed with data you don't need. We can scrape specified categories, particular brands, top 10 lists, individual products etc. Anything you specify, we build the collection to your needs and we can help you to determine this up front. In addition to keeping your target collection as neat as possible, we also keep your costs down by not collecting unnecessary data.

Suitable for: Identifiable sub-sections of competitor catalogues, frequently changing sections to monitor such as Top 10 bestsellers, brand monitoring, specific URL collection

Once your products are mapped and you are directly tracking your competitor's products, you know how much they are selling their equivalent product for. You know how much you are prepared to sell your item for. With the configuration of some powerful yet easy to set up rules, you can automate the job of dynamically pricing your catalogue. Rules allow you to segment your product set, define your lowest selling price using a number of options and factors, set change tolerances, flag for manual approval, set up time limited promotions in advance, have different rules for different competitors, override suggested price changes and more.

A rule preview feature allows you to set up and test rules to perform a "what if?" analysis on your products and see the effect on your pricing. Various levels of protection ensure your pricing won't be affected adversely and you can control which products are in or out of scope. Price automation is only suitable for the Direct Tracking service.

Everyone wants something different from the competitor data we collect. Different businesses, different departments within a business and even individual users have different needs. We have a number of standard charts, dynamic query reports and views within the dashboard and standard downloadable reports to satisfy the most common requirements, but the data we collect and store can be re-presented in any way you like.

We offer bespoke export files in any format (e.g. Excel, CSV, XML) to provide data that can integrate with your systems, we can create tailored Excel reports to deliver exactly the view you need and we can create bespoke charts within the dashboard as optional extra services. Any information we collect plus anything you wish to provide we can merge and report back out.

Suitable for: Specific report requirements, different company department views, third party system integration requirements

Where product mapping is not suitable or practical, e.g. fashion, where products change so quickly they are gone from the shelves by the time you've a mapping exercise is complete, a useful way to monitor the competition is through summary information around their ranges as they relate to your own product categorisation. To achieve this we must still collect detailed product and price information which will still be available to you, but can provide a service to map the competitor products back to your categories for analysis on average price, entry price point, range size, colour options, etc along with bespoke reporting to deliver the analysis you need.

Suitable for: Competitor range visibility within specified categories, brands or across entire sites, intelligence at catalogue and category level rather than individual product price comparison.