In 2016, before We developed Crawlo, there was a need for technologies that could monitor e-commerce sales and help businesses address the factors that drive those sales. I was often invited to board meetings at large e-commerce companies and, during these meetings, I heard many questions that couldn’t be answered without a complete picture of the factors influencing sales. ​We needed to look at ​what was happening in the client’s Webshop as well as the Webshops of their competitors.

Questions like “Why has my conversion rate decreased?” or “What can we do to increase sales?” were common. We didn’t have the information we needed to ask the right questions and the result was usually to change the UX agency or increase investment in advertising.

Accusations ricocheted around the room and between departments during these meetings: ‘The conversion rate has dropped because the Webshop is slow’ some said; others faulted the company’s product selection, price or customer service; some pointed towards the possibility that ‘other competitors are running campaigns that affect our sales.’

But in a complex ecosystem, no single answer is correct, compromised sales are often the result of an array of factors.

Looking for the right answer

At that time we wondered if we could resolve this dilemma. Finding the right answer would present a holy grail of sorts, allowing us to improve sales based on validated data instead of expert opinion. As we sketched out our ideas, users continued to compare prices on Google Shopping and shop on websites with poor user experience, for the simple reason that these websites had the right product at the right price, and that’s why our first decision was to create an assortment and pricing tool.

Large e-commerce companies dedicate the bulk of their resources to supporting day-to-day business operations, as they should, but this often comes at the expense of innovating in technologies that would help their market performance. We decided to address this problem by founding a startup that develops and provides this technology for them.

Building the engine for a price monitoring tool

It’s obvious that price is one of the primary purchase drivers. Many users will put up with an arduous checkout process to get a good price, so we started building a scalable tool to monitor millions of prices per day. Since our clients are rather large e-commerce stores and marketplaces, we approached the task as if we were designing a Ferrari. We laid the technical foundations for speed and scale. We knew that if you start building an engine with cheap components, it will be very difficult to reach the 300 km/h that the customer wants. Today one of our clients monitors more than 1.5M amazon products and receives 2GB of data in only 4 hours, and that includes not only the Buybox offers, but all sellers’ offers and names.

Expanding the range of monitored products

The pricing solution was very helpful for our clients, but sometimes your competitors are promoting products that aren’t listed in your Webshop. You may see the sales of a category drop even though you have the best prices, and this happens when customers are buying other products that you are not listing. Such a turn of events renders your pricing strategy completely useless, because the customer has acted on a factor other than price.

Today, Crawlo distinguishes itself because it not only monitors your matched products, but also the products you haven’t even listed. Crawlo helps you watch the average price of any category and discover competitors’ promotions even if they are not related to the SKUs you are listing, because you are competing for the same client.

Having the right products is the main factor in conversion

Not all products are equally important. Having a good price on a best-selling product is much more important and impacts your sales more than having a good price on hundreds of less important products. In the same way, for any assortment strategist, there is nothing more important than having the right product — the one that users are looking for. Everyone knows the relevant product in the market for some famous categories like smartphones or gaming consoles, but when moving on to other categories like monitors, gaming accessories, pets, gardening etc. knowing the important products becomes a complicated task.

We collect information about millions of products on a daily basis, so we know very well what the market is demanding. Knowing your product opportunities is a matter of crossing your catalog with the existing one in the market. Therefore, knowing your product opportunities is as simple a task as crossing your catalog with all the products available in your market.

That means any category manager or product manager can discover thousands of product opportunities for a given category in one click using our Suite 360º. And because categorization is one of the biggest pain points in the market, we created the Smart Category feature that allows any user to easily create categories no matter how deep and specific they are.

Building the algorithm of Product Relevance.

Big data is more complex to work with. We knew that by expanding the range of monitored products to millions a day, we were making the task of selecting and reviewing product opportunities complex and time consuming. Nobody has the time, or patience, to download the data and carefully analyze products, one by one, in order to find the next opportunity.

So we created an algorithm that differentiates us from all other data providers. It analyzes several signals to determine if a product is relevant or not, and predicts the best products, in terms of sales — nearly in real time. This gives any e-commerce or marketplace an advantage over their competitors, allowing them to react in time to any unforeseen circumstance. While other data providers only offer data based on major retailers, Crawlo includes information from both retailers and marketplaces.

Abracadabra, the missing link between data and action

Thanks to an increase in the number of sellers, marketplaces had the opportunity to sell millions of products, for the first time, without running the risk of stockpiling. But they couldn’t actually do so because first they needed high-quality product content at a reasonable price, and this is right where our new solution comes into play: Abracadabra. This tool uses Artificial Intelligence to scale and speed up the creation of products to infinity.

Unlike tools available on the market that only transform Icecat content into the structure of each e-commerce, Abracadabra uses artificial intelligence to fill in product content from the largest database in Europe. Abracadabra extracts data from thousands of sources distributed all over the world and converts this data into a standardized product file with all of the necessary attributes: product specifications, product images, energy label PDFs, and a unique SEO description.

And finally, to fully service our customer, we’ve added Bestseller Search functionality, an exclusive data-set of sellers that analyzes the top sellers on Amazon monthly and ranks them based on sales and reputation criteria. This functionality not only offers you an exclusive database of sellers and their contact information, but also an analysis of their catalog to allow you to see how their assortment overlaps with yours.

Step by step, building on foundational understandings of our clients’ needs, Crawlo has become a true sales growth accelerator for eCommerce and marketplaces. Crawlo’s unique suite of solutions covers all e-commerce and marketplace cycles: from product discovery, content creation, seller tracking and price monitoring.

None of this would have been possible without Crawlo’s highly qualified and motivated team. Crawlo’s team values creativity, innovation and flexibility and will continue to do so as we expand on and improve our products.

If you want to know more about the fascinating world of Crawlo, leave a comment or contact us via crawlo.com