Competitive Data Analytics

Have you performed a competitive analysis for your business? If so, when did you last do it? How efficiently did you do it?

If your answers to these questions are in the negative or not definitive, then it is likely you are not getting vital business intelligence that could propel your brand growth. Let’s just understand what a competitive data analysis is first.

What is a competitive market analysis?

It is a strategy that comprises researching your competitors to learn about their marketing strategies, products, and sales. Conducting such an analysis will offer you benefits like:

Gaining competitive advantage
Helps you learn from the competitors’ mistakes
Employing more effective business strategy
Gaining a bigger market share
Stay on top of industry trends
Ensure that your product meets or exceeds industry standards
Offers a yardstick to measure your own growth

Additionally, it helps you to identify your product’s USP, and how it differs from that of the competition, and this can help you craft better marketing strategies in the future. Strategies that are unique, and haven’t been tried out by your rivals.

What is competitive market research?

Competitive market research is about the identification and comparison of important market KPIs that can help determine the differences between the products and services of your company as compared to those of your competitors. Thorough market research will help lay the foundation for a smart and efficient strategy that help you increase your sales and revenues.

Price Comparison Solutions

Competition today is extremely intense. Whether it’s online or offline, consumers today have thousands of stores and products to choose from. Naturally, a savvy shopper will compare prices and choose the lowest priced one – provided it’s the identical product that they compare. To keep up with this trend, retailers race to get to the lowest price for their products, changing the prices thousands of times per day even. And they need to do this while still earning a decent profit.

Consumers need to identify, categorize, and match products as a first step in cross-website price comparison. Unfortunately, every e-commerce site has its own way of displaying their products, making it complicated and cumbersome to compare.

A smart pricing solution that picks out identical products from various websites with speed and precision, and allows continuous and automatic tracking of prices is the need of the hour.

But we already have many solutions for pricing intelligence, so why not just use them? What is the problem?

The problems are quite a few – rather, the challenges. Unfortunately, most of them don’t work in time. It is therefore akin to doing it in retrospection; like putting off the getting actionable insights that help retailers to gain an edge over the competition. It is similar to getting an autopsy when you need a diagnosis.

Types of Pricing Comparison Solutions

The different pricing intelligence software solutions available in the market today fall into one of these categories:

Solutions Developed In-House

Retailers often develop their own software, and these rely greatly on manually aggregating data, and therefore, their capability of product matching is not precise. Often, professionals with little experience of developing machines or systems for data or number crunching develop these solutions. Such software can cause major problems in operations when it comes to updates, bug fixing, and so on.

Web scraping solutions

Software with no feature to match products and normalize data is called web scraping solutions. They also are incapable of providing significant actionable insights. You will also find that scaling them up to handle voluminous data in times of promotional campaigns or seasonal sales will be very tough.

Do It Yourself solutions

These solutions necessitate a great deal of manual work like research and data entry. Obviously, they won’t be close to the software developed by professionals in terms of precision, speed, scalability and affordability.

So, What is the Answer?

OttixHow is different from all of these solutions. It leverages the potential of artificial intelligence. Our competitive data analytics software is an intelligent solution that compares prices accurately, continuously, and in a timely fashion. It facilitates retailers to gain a competitive edge by delivering actionable insights on pricing by our super-fast product matching. Retailers get access to pricing data and details on thousands of products and hundreds of competitors, whenever they require.

The Tech Behind OttixHow

1. Data Aggregation

Our solution can gather data from numerous web sources and complicated environments on the web accurately and unswervingly. Our in-depth industry experience has supplied us with volumes of data that can be used for machine learning in product matching. We have data sets collected from millions of products from diverse retail verticals and geographic locations. They comprise retail information that is arrange as per hierarchy. The highest level contains product name, description and other details, while the lowest level contains details about categories and sub-categories. Our team interprets the information and leverages exclusive tools to generate datasets with labels. This is made possible due to the partially automated systems or training data creation systems, ML architecture, and robust QA abilities.

2. AI for Matching Products

At OttixHow, we have a centralized platform that leverages image and text recognition capabilities to match products. Similar SKUs are identified accurately, from thousands of products in hundreds of online stores. We make use of a collective of deep learning architectures customized to natural language processing, computer vision problems, and retail-specific trial-and-error experimentation. We categorize products depending on the features, designing a normalization layer that depends on the text or image-based characteristics. We employ a powerful semantics layer, and sophisticated, accurate, and bespoke word representation techniques. Our software also leverages the most efficient image data processing techniques to extract images and enhance their quality from among the millions of products available. The images are rendered comparable and allocated across numerous stores for quick access. This enables our image matching technology to conduct searches on a huge scale, without compromising on accuracy.

Human Intelligence in the Loop

If the machine-driven match scores are low, our QA team checks the output to ascertain the following:

The reasons for low confidence store
Verification of correct product matches
A method of encoding this info and feeding it into the algorithm as a rule.

This has helped us create a feedback loop which has helped us improve our performance over time, allowing us to scale up our product matching accurately.

Actionable Insights Via Data Visualization

After completion of the matching process, the software aggregates the prices at all frequencies and enables retailers to price their products optimally in a continuous manner. Our pricing insights are delivered through our web portal/app, via reports and dashboards.

To summarize

OttixHow offers numerous benefits to retailers. Let’s go over them briefly:

Sophisticated technology delivers pricing intelligence, simplifying pricing strategy and facilitating the creation of smarter pricing policies.
Helps in optimizing promotional strategies and to react quickly to price changes to beat the competition.
Identify and leverage opportunities as they arise, optimize your pricing, and track your competitors’ pricing
Gain detailed insights into industry trends, competitive analysis, and price changes to maximize profitability
Get maximum returns on money spent on advertising and other promotional activities
Make more accurate predictions of sales for specific periods

Get the OttixHow advantage. Get in touch with us now to know how we can help your business grow!