The AI platform that helped a retailer gather competitive price intelligence from the market
Price intelligence: A business imperative
It is always a war of prices in the e-commerce world, more so now than ever before. Irrespective of the size and type, e-commerce companies need valuable market intelligence to ensure market share, optimum stock levels and, most importantly, profitability.
Price intelligence is the timeless need for any business. Companies need to have this knowledge on real-time basis. They must also maintain differentiation as value leaders but, at the same time, ignore rogue sellers. Dynamic market price analysis is the key for this business need, and it must be performed as often as possible in reaction to real-time market changes.
Process automation to the rescue
In the retail space, especially, in the online market, data aggregation by combing the web is a feasible option. This being an oft-repeating activity, automation of the process becomes the key aspect of the solution. The data intensive and automated processes can further be strengthened by building intelligence in the automation algorithm for weighting key competitors higher over less important ones. This method also ensures that the sellers that use click-baits or the new sellers with no significant online sales record are ignored or weighted less by the algorithm.
A CES customer, which is a leading online auto parts retailer in the US, was facing the above situation and wanted to rework on its product pricing strategy to maximize sales and stay ahead of the competition. CES conducted a detailed analysis of the customer’s new pricing strategy and developed an intuitive AI based solution that used data aggregation and process automation to crawl into competitor websites, acquire product pricing details, and rank the websites based on the weights attached to each competitor.
Customers must maintain differentiation as value leaders but, at the same time, ignore rogue sellers.
CENTIPEDE: AI based process automation platform by CES
TO implement the solution, CES developed CENTIPEDE, an intuitive AI based automation platform, that generated pricing intelligence using data aggregation and process automation methods.
Data aggregation is the process of collecting information from disparate sources to perform statistical analysis and generate meaningful insights.
CENTIPEDE is a low-code/no-code AI platform with a simple and user-friendly GUI. The user can drag and drop the data nodes, connect the processes and, on a click of a button, execute a process in an automated manner. It also provides the ability to build custom logic around a pre-defined process step with minimal coding.
Real-time retail price intelligence
The AI based Machine Learning solution – CENTIPEDE, has the innate capability to process and correlate structured and unstructured data, identify repeating patterns, and data insights. This modern AI solution can effectively join the dots across a plethora of data sets such as websites, images, documents, databases, etc. to predict upcoming business trends and provide alerts.
CENTIPEDE used webpage-scraping technique to collect pricing details from hundreds of competitor websites, compile information for the product list, analyze pricing trends, and other relevant information. Process automation was used for repeatability, to eliminate errors and to minimize cost.
This AI platform uses Machine Learning based mapping algorithm and provides tapered learning to analyze and monitor competitor pricing, recommend pricing thresholds to neutralize competition with zero human effort. The Centipede solution empowered the auto parts retailer to improve sales and gain an edge over its competitors.
CENTIPEDE used webpage-scraping technique to collect pricing details from hundreds of competitor websites.
Business advantages offered by CENTIPEDE
Some of the key business advantages that CENTIPEDE offers are:
- Easy integration with any unstructured data set within or outside the company
- Push button or trigger-based automation
- Modern architecture – AI/ML concepts
- Data-driven decision making
CENTIPEDE platform has other possible implementations for automation. It can be used to automate a process where there is a need to eliminate human agent that interacts with a customer (another human). It has further implications in automating machine to machine conversations as well. For more information or a conversation on how the Centipede automation platform can support your business case, please contact us at: sales@cesltd.com.
