Introduction

Effective and actionable market research has asserted itself as one of the most essential means of survival for any brand functioning in the e-commerce world, with competition rising and intelligent planning becoming more and more crucial. Poor market research and ineffective strategy sees immediate, palpable consequences, and timely action can be the difference between profits and massive losses. Fortunately, advancements in technology have enabled companies worldwide to effectively tackle this seemingly insurmountable task- allowing automated tools to scan data and enabling marketing teams to shape their plans according to its findings.

One such tool is Intelligence Node’s Incompetitor®, a retail analytics and competitive intelligence software that empowers you to monitor the e-commerce metrics that matter the most to you. The aim of this blog post is to shed some light on how it works, real world applications, and what sets it apart from other data crawling and price intelligence software.

The process

To begin, product movement is tracked through the proprietary visibility algorithm, which crawls using competition SKU codes among other numerous attributes such as price, product description, color, material, style, pattern, and any distinctive features or specifics the algorithm can use to create matches. Next, via the Exact & Similar Match algorithm, each product is given a score to distinguish a variety of matches as either an Exact Match or a Similar Match. This allows brands to draw comparisons between competing products and brands in the same sector, and monitor the products performing well on competitor websites.

Unlike most tracking programs and services, Intelligence Node is able to offer more refined, in-depth analyses and insights by presenting brands with actual competitor SKU comparisons apart from selling trends, product launches and assortment gaps which are common stances when it comes to a competitor benchmarking product.

An example of top trending Fashion subcategories in Incompetitor

The volume

With massive volumes of products and expansive retail activity constantly moving across the world wide web, Intelligence Node prides itself in having one of the largest global product databases within sight, with over a billion products from more than 190,000 brands that are mapped across 1400+ retail categories, all based on proprietary data clustering and normalization approach. This allows for brands to be able to access highly organized and efficiently presented masses of data without fear of missing a single detail.

The accuracy

Intelligence Node’s robust categorization algorithm provides an unmatched, massive scope of tracking, with the best in industry accuracy rate of over 95%. This accuracy rate ensures that retailers and brands have accurate and legitimate data that can be utilized for making quick, informed decisions.

The outcome

The practical points of Incompetitor®: in summation, this all-encompassing e-commerce analytics tool covers a broad range of pricing, products, brands, sectors, with incomparable action-oriented insights and efficient presentation, all in real time – giving brands the power to react instantly and keep up with ever-changing and evolving market trends.

For example, if the product being tracked is the Adidas’ Trefoil t-shirt, the range of tracking parameters or attributes included are color, gender, sleeve length, fabric, neck shape, pattern, etc. As presented in the screenshot above, this particular product is out of stock. Incompetitor® responds by notifying retailers with real time alerts, allowing them to optimize visibility of exact or similar products- effectively identifying a brand-level gap in a competing catalog, instantly.

The tool follows a similar process when rival retailers launch new items or product lines. Real-time notifications are sent to your dashboard, complete with product descriptions and links to the product. Through an advanced search of product attributes, brands are empowered with the ability to check real-time prices and discounts for similar products across the entire retail landscape.

Incompetitor® will also provide a detailed overview of the history of price fluctuations of any product to further analyze its market performance, thus providing retailers with the tools to create a unique, relevant and comprehensive competitive analysis by understanding how competitors perform.

This process thus yields actionable insights that instantly help formulate pricing strategies, so brands can adequately respond to market conditions and grow their presence, performance, and profits and increase product level margins.

Conclusion

With one of the world’s largest retail datasets, Incompetitor® makes wading through oceans of statistics, products, retailers, and pricing strategies simple. With its sophisticated algorithms and through the use of simplified, intuitive, and interactive data visualization, it delivers timely and actionable competitor insights concerning pricing, promotion, and catalog movement enabling you to react swiftly to rising opportunities quicker than your competition, at all times.