Retail and Manufacturing

For today’s retailers and manufacturers, data represents a key strategic asset. Moving forward, those organizations that can most effectively harness data will be the ones best positioned for success. Today, the web represents the largest database, and the intelligence it contains represents a massive opportunity—offering a way for teams to better understand and predict industry trends and make more informed product and pricing decisions. However, to capitalize on this opportunity, organizations can’t rely on legacy web scraping tools and tactics.

With Import.io, organizations can leverage a comprehensive Web Data Integration solution that makes it fast, easy, and affordable to maximize the strategic value of web data. This solution enables retail and manufacturing professionals to identify, extract, prepare, integrate, and consume web data. With these capabilities, Import.io delivers the high quality, timely, and extensive intelligence you need to outperform competitors and stay on top of dynamic markets.

Read the sections below to discover the many ways retailers and manufacturers can use the Import.io solution to benefit their businesses.

Track and Automate Competitive Price Monitoring

The nature of the pricing analysts job has changed dramatically in recent years. Gone are the days when teams of analysts would have to travel from store to store to gather pricing information. Now, analysts can capture all the data they need online, but that doesn’t mean the job is easy. Most retailers have many competitors and thousands of SKUs to track—and data is changing constantly.

Manually gathering pricing data from multiple competitors’ websites is time consuming and error prone. In addition, competitor price monitoring needs to happen very regularly to feed a pricing strategy that stays ahead of the competition.

Import.io can help by automatically and routinely gathering data from any ecommerce website. Import.io can match your merchandise with competitors’ offerings by capturing data on categories, brands, prices, and other parameters. For even more time savings, Import.io offers change reports that make it easy to see when prices have changed and when products have been added or removed.

Find out how to create a competitive price monitoring strategy.

Ensure MAP Compliance monitoring

For manufacturers, it’s important to monitor retailer channels to gain insights on product performance and whether partners are adhering to minimum advertised price (MAP) agreements. If teams have to rely solely on manual checks of every website in which relevant products are listed, it is virtually impossible to ensure compliance with MAP policies.

Import.io automates this function by providing a complete analysis of all products and prices, delivering automated alerts on price changes that can be generated hourly, daily, and weekly. Import.io also captures a time-stamped snapshot of a website to provide proof of compliance or non-compliance.

Read about minimum advertised price enforcement best practices.

Get Intelligent Product Matching

When you monitor competitor pricing and MAP compliance over multiple websites, you need to have confidence that you are matching accurately on an individual product level. With Import.io, you can employ intelligent and accurate product matching, collecting data on your inventory and automatically finding the same products on competitor websites. The solution uses machine learning to minimize incorrect matches and it automatically and routinely updates product matches in order to reflect ongoing changes to product inventory.

Capture Images and Descriptions for Online Marketplaces

Getting product descriptions and images from multiple manufacturers can be an arduous task. Manually copying data and images from manufacturer websites is time consuming and not always feasible. Waiting on the manufacturer to send the images and details may take even longer.

With Import.io, you can automatically extract data and images that are ready to upload to your website.

Find out how to get images and descriptions using Import.io.

Monitor Customer Sentiment

Retailers, manufacturers of consumer goods, and hospitality businesses all have customer reviews on multiple websites. It’s easy to access the reviews and see overall average scores, but this only offers limited intelligence. What if the aggregate scores are the same across competitors? For example, what if every 12-cup automatic coffee maker has four stars, or every large hotel in a certain market has three stars?

It’s time-consuming and difficult to read through 100s of reviews in order to determine what differentiates various offerings, let alone to gain actionable intelligence based on all this information.

Import.io offers a way to simplify this effort. Initially, Import.io can easily generate a spreadsheet based on every review on every website. Import.io can then enable intelligent comparisons between businesses, for example, based on keywords in customer reviews.

To find out more, read the article: Turning Customer Reviews into Actionable Data.