Import.io has many solutions for helping retailers and manufacturers stay competitive. It can be as simple as extracting data from websites, such as descriptions and images for online marketplaces or as sophisticated as automating web interaction and extraction workflows, such as finding and purchasing the lowest priced products, to monitoring competitor and marketplace prices, to searching the web to find and add images to customer purchase receipts. Web data benefits all areas of retail and manufacturing.
Competitor price monitoring
The job of a pricing analyst has evolved from having teams of people going store to store to gather price data to monitoring competitors online. While monitoring one or two competitors online seems much easier than visiting a few stores, most retailers have many competitors and thousands of SKUs.
Manually gathering competitor price data from multiple 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 gathering data from any ecommerce website on a regular basis. Import.io can match merchandise with competitors’ by category, brand, price or other parameters.
For even more time savings, Import.io Change Reports deliver a report on what prices have changed and what products have been added or removed.
Find out how to create a competitive price monitoring strategy.
MAP compliance monitoring
For manufacturers, it’s important to monitor retailer channels to gain insight on product performance and Minimum Advertised Price (MAP). Ensuring compliance with MAP is impossible when manually checking every website where products are listed.
Import.io automates this function by providing a complete analysis of all products and prices with hourly, daily, or weekly change alerts on price changes. Import.io also captures a time-stamped snapshot of a website for proof of compliance or non-compliance.
Read about minimum advertised price enforcement best practices.
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. Product matching looks your inventory and automatically finds the same products on competitor websites. Machine learning minimizes incorrect matches and automatically updates product matches on a regular basis in order to handle changes to product inventory.
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.
Import.io can extract data and images ready to upload to an ecommerce website.
Find out how to get images and descriptions using Import.io.
Monitoring customer sentiment
Consumer-based, retail, or hospitality businesses all have customer reviews on multiple websites. It’s easy to access the reviews and see an overall average score and that’s great, but what if the scores are the same across competitors, such as every 12 cup automatic coffee maker has four stars, or every large hotel in a certain market has four stars. It doesn’t provide much information.
It’s time-consuming and a bit mind-boggling to read through 100s of reviews to determine what differentiates the businesses and take action based on the feedback.
One way to simplify this is with Import.io. As a basic solution, Import.io can pull a spreadsheet of every review on every website. Import.io can take it a step further and compare businesses, based on keywords in customer reviews.
To find out more, read the article: Turning Customer Reviews into Actionable Data.
A few of our retail and manufacturing customers
