|"We can now make confident commercial decisions based on accurate market intelligence"

-Project Director

 

 

SITUATION

In order to be competitive in the mobile phones reseller market, the client required a solution to get real time pricing on targeted models across all competitors in the UK market. The client also needed to be able to data mine the data and use to gain market and pricing intelligence

CHALLENGE

 With no official database of market prices of refurbished mobile phones. The client was dissatisfied with their current use of both manual and automated tools which were prone to errors and lacked the dedicated resource to monitor and manage the process

SOLUTION

WebAutomation set up automated collection of detailed product and prices of mobile phones across all the major UK competing retailers. The solution extracts 8 attributes for each product (Model No, Brand name, Storage, Condition, Colour, Network provider, Stock Status,Price)  and monitors 10 e-commerce competitors websites with 400 products each on average. Webautomation crawls on average 10,000 pages daily and 300,000 pages monthly;

Webautomation set this up within 2 weeks , and put automatic data monitoring in place i.e If or when a website changes its structure , we fix it in a couple of business days. The raw data is also validated

User interface

A client facing portal is also made available to the client. Allowing them to add new phone models and access reports self service 24/7

Reports.

For the client to gain insight into the raw data we also enriched the data by adding additional fields and reports which indicated the change in the prices and frequency of stock availability .A report which could be provided would always highlight the lowest priced

API Interface

We also created an API to allow them feed all the data into their internal applications

 

BUSINESS VALUE

Working with WebAutomation.io the company has been able to respond competitively to RFP's confident that they are priced most competitively. They are also able to see price trends and use this intelligence in making purchasing and selling decisions

We did some analysis to understand the impact of value we have contributed

SPEED

We estimated to be extracting the data ~20x faster than previously due to our fully automated systems. Removing the need for the previous manual interruptions to the process

COST

The team that was doing this activity have now freed up to ~30% of their working week. They now spend the extra time doing more value added tasks like making data driven decisions and recommendations based on using trusted data

We also estimated that creating an in-house solution we built would have cost them 3X more

AGILITY

The team are now able to react quickly to changes in market prices. They can make quick decision to counter any changes made by competitors

 

KEY SUCCESS

• Aggregation of new product and price data set

• Automated data extraction and feed from previous tedious manual process

• On-boarding onto our easy to use User Interface for self-service management

• Additional reporting and data enrichment for insights

 

 

Download the Ecommerce pricing case study