Tracking competition can be a fool’s errand if not done properly. By properly, we mean using modern technology to cover all the aspects that define your competitor’s product and their pricing methods. In that regard, companies usually target competition that is nearest to them in terms of local positioning. Direct competition, if you will. However, ever since the triple W entered the mainstream, the scope has been slowly shifting to all corners of the globe.
That means conducting global market research has become crucial to good business practice. By tracking your competitors worldwide, you are getting a complete picture of the current market trends and creating more opportunities for your business. Still, not every automated competitor tracking tool is capable of such feat. Luckily for you, our Incompetitor is and we’ll scribe a few lines in this post to present you how, as well as what you gain out of it. Enjoy, we know you will
A quick overview of how Incompetitor works
First, a few words about the general principle behind Incompetitor. It covers over one billion products (numerically speaking, that translates to 1,000,000,000) that come from over 130,000 brands across 800,000 e-commerce websites. Our attributes similarity feature is plugged into our comprehensive database of attributes and a technology overlay that deliver near and exact match results. Based on this proprietary data clustering and normalization method, all the products we track are then mapped and split into 1100+ retail categories.
Top-ranked subcategories per Incompetitor
Thanks to this robust categorization, we provide detailed market benchmarking with 95%+ accuracy levels. Combined together with what we just mentioned, all of this produces more than one petabyte (PB) of data (equivalent to quadrillion that has 15 zeros) a month. That means one million gigabytes (GB) of data, if that’s easier to count, every 30 days. That’s sorting more that 30,000 GB of text and image data every day. A massive volume of information, indeed, but don’t worry – because we are a Big Data lab focusing on retail, this is a walk in the park for us as we know exactly what to do with it and turn it into something meaningful.
Those would be the main presentation points for Incompetitor. For a more detailed insight into the inner schemes of our competitor tracking tool, check out this in-depth post about data tracking technology behind it.
Now, on the focal point of this post – the global side of competitor tracking.
Worldwide coverage
The key word here is worldwide. Ever since the Internet broke through, businesses quickly realized the increasing value of the online aspect and soon added it to their portfolio to expand their operations. However, some didn’t realize it quickly enough and to this day, still struggle to understand the intrigues of online business.
Nowadays, your business has rivals in every part of the world, vying for the same pool of customers. That also means different sensibilities with the most important one – language. Covering a certain number of products is one thing, but understanding everything about it is a whole different story. In that regard, Intelligence Node (IN) can proudly say that we are the world’s first retail analytics platform that has a built-in multi-lingual feature. The purpose of this feature (or fonctionnalité, as said in France) is one of the utmost importance – it provides our customers with a single view of their global presence and overall market intelligence. What does this multilingualism means? It means that Incompetitor, which supports 29 languages, enables online businesses to benchmark competitors across markets irrespective of the catalog display language.
It that sounds a bit too vague for your taste, look at it this way. Out of the billion products that we track, there’s bound to be some of them in a different language, right? Sure, the price is a uniform code and the most prominent feature, for the most part, but that’s not all – there are other marketing mix elements to consider that constitute the product as a whole. That is why our SaaS (software as a service) offering has several levels of data curating. This makes sure that all data is normalized across different online stores (including language translation, category, and attributes standardization). Once the software normalizes the data, it utilizes IN’s patented similarity server technology to match the products.
Ease of use
Incompetitor converts all of the data back into English for a uniform dashboard. The end result is a neatly organized treasure trove of actionable insights for you to leverage. Our sophisticated machine learning algorithms are configured in a way to recognize patterns not only in the text-based information (the usual stuff – product name, description, availability, etc) but in images as well, where we apply deep learning to identify, extract and match. What you get is a truly global coverage of all your competitors, both in volume and in understanding.
An example of trending products in Indian currency
The plug-n-play approach of our competition tracking tool allows each user to slice and dice data in the way they see fit. It’s easy to set up and tailor it to your requirements. We also offer Open API frameworks and data delivery into native systems as available options for consuming the data. Either which way you want insights, you get them.
Conclusion
When it comes to the tracking of global proportions, we can safely say that Incompetitor passes with flying colors. Having real-time market intelligence is one of the most important aspects of doing business online. Our tool is an excellent way to tap new geographical markets and effortlessly map the competition while reducing the spending of your money, time and resources to a minimum. When you automate competitor benchmarking on such a scale, you can focus on your global sales and marketing efforts and enjoy all the benefits of competitive price intelligence on a worldwide level.
