The DataWeave Blog

Tag: pricing and promotions

Beyond Basic Price Monitoring: Advanced Applications of Competitive Intelligence
It’s up to senior leadership, whether you’re a Chief Strategy Officer, Pricing Executive, or Commercial Director, to think big picture about your company’s competitive intelligence strategy. For more junior team members, it’s easy to get caught in the “this is how we’ve always done it” mindset and continue to go through the motions of price monitoring.

You don’t have that luxury—it’s up to you to find and implement new ways to move beyond basic price monitoring and usher your company into an era of achieving actionable insights through competitive intelligence. There is much more to gain from competitive data than simple price monitoring.

How can retailers leverage clean, competitive data to uncover strategic insights beyond basic price comparisons? This article will help you shift your mindset from tactical monitoring to strategic insight generation. We’ll see how sophisticated analysis of clean and refined competitive data can reveal competitor strategies, regional and geographic opportunities, and overall market trends.

It’s time to shift away from standard reporting, which should be left for your pricing owners and end users, and towards gaining competitive intelligence to shape your holistic company pricing strategy. With the right tools, you can make this shift a reality.

Regional Price Intelligence

One significant opportunity you should take advantage of is a greater understanding of regional price intelligence. Understanding the nuances that shape how products, categories, and other retailers’ prices according to geographical differences can set your company up to win customer trust and dollars at checkout.

Understanding geographic and regional pricing strategies

Geographic price intelligence helps leaders leverage market opportunities based on where sales are happening. Variations in how products and categories are priced across regions often reflect competitor tactics, local demand, and cost structures.

Let’s consider an example that impacts a broad geography, such as the entire continental United States – egg prices. Eggs are a staple grocery item and are frequently a loss leader in stores. This means they are products priced below their cost specifically to draw customers into stores.

However, Avian Flu outbreaks affecting millions of birds have become more common recently. These outbreaks drive the cost of eggs higher as flocks must be culled to prevent the spread of the disease. This means that retailers must act to maintain acceptable margins or losses without frightening away customers or losing their trust.

Avian Flu has been especially bad in Iowa and California. Retailers in these regions face tough decisions during outbreaks. They need to figure out how to balance the high prices required to cover the supply shortages with maintaining consumer trust that this staple product will not be perceived as ‘overpriced.’ Customers expect retailers to be fair even when supply chain issues make it challenging to keep prices stable.

Another example impacting the broader USA is credit card defaults. Credit card defaults are reaching levels unseen since the financial crisis of 2008. $46 billion worth of credit card balances were written off in the first nine months of 2024 alone. This unprecedented figure highlights the fact that many Americans are struggling financially. Higher-income earners continue to do ok, but lower-income families are feeling the pressure more than ever.

Understanding the differences between the geographies you sell in can help you construct your pricing strategies better. This is especially true as consumers brace themselves for more anticipated economic hardship.

Retailers must set realistic financial targets without overpricing their catalogs. Otherwise, they risk losing customers who would otherwise have bought their products. Competitive intelligence can help retailers understand how economic disparities impact core consumer bases.

Pricing leaders can leverage insights around geographic variations in supply, demand, and competitor pricing to help in situations like these. With how important eggs are, changes to their price can spill over into other categories. And with credit card defaults affecting hundreds of thousands of Americans, having a way to dive into these topics can help shape overarching strategies.

Customer perception is a recurring theme in competitive intelligence. It’s not only about the actual value your brand offers but the perceived value based on historical context, current events, and competition.

Leveraging Regional Price Differences for Strategic Advantage

On the topic of customer perception, there are strategic ways to use customer perception to your advantage. One of these is detecting cross-market arbitrage opportunities using competitive intelligence and actioning them.

But what is cross-market arbitrage? It’s the practice of exploiting the differences in price across different markets or regions. As a retailer, you can use cross-market arbitrage to your advantage by finding disparities in market conditions and strategically pricing your products to entice customers or offer more value. These opportunities can be in demand, supply, or competitive pricing. Acting quickly in markets where frequent disruptions happen can drive your business forward.

DataWeave’s advanced competitive intelligence tools can analyze regional market trends to help you respond to real-time local demand fluctuations or cost pressures.

Local Market Dynamics

Pricing isn’t a one-size-fits-all operation. Where and what you’re pricing truly matters. Pricing teams should take price zones into account when constructing pricing strategies. This is because pricing isn’t equivalent across locations; it’s localized. Understanding this fact is critical for category-specific considerations at the macro and micro levels.

This map shows a retailer’s regional price differentials on a breakfast basket. With the ability to access and refine your data, you can better construct maps like this one to track local market dynamics. Determine where you need to differentiate prices based on locality, understand the strategic stance of your competitors, and plan if you start to see changes in competitive price zones.

Competitor Strategy Detection

As a retailer, you should continuously monitor your competitors, whether they’re succeeding or stagnating. One example of a major retailer that is seeing growth even during this challenging economic time is Costco. Costco is an interesting case because they do not have stores in every major city or even in every state.

Costco has its brand strategy down, and it is tied to the pricing strategy. Costco has committed to its customers to provide quality items at competitive prices, and they’ve delivered even in a volatile economy. Costco has managed to maintain competitive prices on core merchandise and make strategic pricing adjustments on items that matter most to members. Their private label brand, Kirkland Signature, highlights their value-first approach. They continue to lead with price reductions like:
- Organic Peanut Butter: $11.49 → $9.99
- Chicken Stock: $9.99 → $8.99
- Sauvignon Blanc: $7.49 → $6.99
Costco has figured out how to balance premium offerings for cost-conscious consumers with standardly priced items filling the shopper’s basket. This demonstrates that they have a pricing strategy that relies on competitive intelligence and market trends.

With the correct data and tools, any retailer can conduct research to discover more about their competitors and gain usable insights into their implemented pricing strategies. Once established, this can act as an early warning signal so you can take action.

For example, understanding whether a retailer operates with a stable Everyday Low Price (EDLP) strategy or a more dynamic High/Low pricing approach is crucial when building and maintaining the integrity of your pricing strategy.

Data should be able to show you things like:
- When holiday price decreases start to accelerate
- How quickly a retailer responds to cost increases (especially at the category or item level)
- The cadence of seasonal campaigns and their impact on pricing behavior
When we move beyond the numbers, these patterns tell a story about how to win in today’s competitive retail landscape. After all, pricing isn’t just a standard reporting tactic. In its truest form, it’s a strategy rooted in understanding the bigger picture of your consumers, competition, and the economy.

Actionable Intelligence Framework

With a practical system to turn insights into action, your company’s pricing strategy is much more likely to drive actual results. Merely collecting data and churning out out-of-date reports won’t cut it. Instead, begin to identify patterns and insights for accurate competitive intelligence. Use this simple framework to start setting up a comprehensive competitive intelligence process.
- Setting up monitoring systems: Leverage technology to monitor and aggregate data on your competition, market trends, and consumer behavior. Ensure the system chosen can clean and refine the data along the way so it’s ready to be analyzed.
- Creating action triggers: Define clear thresholds and triggers based on key insights. These can be things like price changes of a certain amount, competitor moves, assortment changes, or regional and geographic trends. These triggers should prompt specific, pre-planned actions for your team to capitalize on opportunities.
- Response protocol development: Change management is easier with a plan. Work on building out and training your teams on protocols for specific triggers. When something arises, they know the protocol to take advantage of the opportunity or mitigate the challenge effectively.
- Performance measurement: Measure the impact of your team’s protocol-based actions with the help of pre-determined KPIs and then hone your approach to competitive intelligence based on the results.
Competitive Intelligence at Your Fingertips

Shifting from a latent standard reporting and price monitoring mindset to a growth mindset centered around competitive intelligence doesn’t need to be a struggle. The key is to lean on the tools that will accelerate your company’s journey to finding the right insights and putting action behind them quickly.

Start by conducting a competitive intelligence maturity assessment to evaluate your organization’s current state and identify areas for improvement. Then, create a capability development roadmap for your company to track efficacy and progress toward your goal.

Want to talk to the experts in competitive pricing intelligence? Click here to speak with the DataWeave team!
February 3, 2025
Black Friday vs Boxing Day: Which Sale Event Offered Better Deals?
When it comes to shopping events, Black Friday stands out as one of the most anticipated dates for scoring deals. Typically occurring the day after Thanksgiving, the weekend kicks off the holiday shopping season with a frenzy of discounts. But Boxing Day, celebrated on December 26, is also well-known for its post-Christmas clearance sales.

This Black Friday, US eCommerce sales increased by a hefty 14.6% in 2024, according to Mastercard SpendingPulse. While Black Friday leads in overall revenue generation for retailers, Boxing Day presents unique opportunities for clearing post-holiday inventory.

For a consumer, which sale event is likely to offer the most attractive deals?

At DataWeave, we analyzed discounts across retailers and categories to uncover the answer.

Our Methodology

For this analysis, we tracked pricing data across major retailers for Black Friday and Boxing Day. To provide a comprehensive analysis of Black Friday pricing strategies, we explored a matched products dataset, comparing identical 14,000+ SKUs across retailers within key categories.
- Categories included: Consumer Electronics, Home & Furniture, Apparel, Health & Beauty, Grocery
- Retailers included: Amazon, Target, Walmart, Sephora, Ulta Beauty, Overstock, Home Depot, Best Buy, Saks Fifth Ave, Nordstrom, Macy’s, Bloomingdale’s, Neiman Marcus
- Timeline: November 26 (Black Friday), December 26 (Boxing Day)
Average Discounts: Black Friday vs Boxing Day

Our analysis reveals that Black Friday generally offered steeper discounts across most categories, although Boxing Day wasn’t far behind. Here’s a breakdown:

While Black Friday led in most categories, Apparel saw a slight edge on Boxing Day, with discounts averaging 40.22% compared to 37.67% on Black Friday. Electronics, Beauty, and Home, however, remained more lucrative during Black Friday.

Top 5 Products Higher Discounts on Black Friday

Diving deeper into specific products, here are our top 5 picks offering better discounts during Black Friday.
- Appliances like an Immersion blender set offering a discount of 88.29%, significantly higher than its Boxing Day offer of 86.62%.
- High-end electronics like the Microsoft Surface Pro 4 also saw substantial markdowns at 84.60%.
- In beauty and fashion, both La Roche Posay’s retinol serum and Vera Bradley’s satchel offered discounts above 80%.
- Even everyday essentials like paper towels enjoyed generous discounts, with markdowns reaching 82.35% during Black Friday compared to 76.47% on Boxing Day.
Top 5 Products With Higher Discounts on Boxing Day

Boxing Day revealed some remarkable deals across diverse categories, with certain products offering significantly better value than their Black Friday counterparts.
- The JBL Go 2 portable speaker emerged as the standout, with an extraordinary 82% Boxing Day discount compared to just 20% on Black Friday—a dramatic 62% difference.
- Home furnishings showed strong Boxing Day performance, with the Costway accent armchair set reaching 80.30% off.
In Conclusion

Black Friday reigns supreme in driving early holiday sales, offering deeper discounts and drawing larger crowds. However, Boxing Day remains critical for retailers to offload surplus inventory and attract post-holiday shoppers.

By combining insights from both events, retailers can refine their strategies to maximize revenue and enhance customer satisfaction. For shoppers, the decision comes down to timing—shop early for better deals or wait to capitalize on clearance markdowns. The products and categories with more attractive offers tend to vary between these two sale events. Hence, as a shopper, it’s a good idea to keep track of prices all through the holiday season to take advantage of the best deals.

Check out our comprehensive coverage of Black Friday 2024 deals and discounts across categories.

For a deeper dive into the world of competitive pricing intelligence and to explore how our solutions can benefit apparel retailers and brands, reach out to us today!
January 21, 2025
Amazon Prime Day Pricing Trends 2024: Deals and Discounts Galore Across Categories

Amazon Prime Day 2024 has once again shattered records, with more items sold during the two-day event than any previous Prime Day. Prime members worldwide saved billions across all categories, while independent sellers moved an impressive 200 million items.

At DataWeave, we conducted an extensive analysis of the discounts offered by Amazon across major categories. By examining over 47,000 SKUs, we’ve uncovered compelling insights into pricing strategies, competitive positioning, and emerging trends in the eCommerce space.

Since products on Amazon and other eCommerce websites are often sold at discounts even on normal days not linked to a sale event, we delved into the real value that Prime Day offers to shoppers by focusing on price reductions or the Additional Discount during the sale compared to the week before. As a result, our approach highlights the genuine benefits of the event for shoppers who count on lower prices during the sale. At the same time, our report also includes the Absolute Discounts offered during Prime Day, which represents the total markdown relative to the MSRP.

Amazon’s Cross-Category Discount Strategy

Our analysis reveals that the Electronics category saw the highest discounts with an average absolute discount of 20.4% and additional discounts on Prime Day amounting to 10.4%. Meanwhile the Home & Furniture had the lowest discount at 13.1%.

The Health & Beauty category saw significant additional discounts during Prime Day, at 9.26%. The Apparel category offered attractive absolute (16.10%) and additional (8.90%) discounts.

Category Deep Dive

Consumer Electronics

Still the star of the show, the electronics category saw the highest markdowns this Prime Day with absolute discounts at 20.40% and across 14.61% of their inventory.

Across Electronics subcategories, Earbuds had the highest markdowns at 34.80%, followed closely by Wireless Headphones at 30.60% and Headphones at 29.00%, with steep additional discounts during Prime Day as well. Apple AirPods Pro, for example, retailed at $168 (down from $249) at a 32% discount.

Meanwhile, smartphones had the lowest markdowns at 9.30%, followed by Laptops at 10.50%. Laptops also had the lowest additional discount during Prime Day at just 1.28%, significantly lower than other subcategories. Speakers (20.80%), Drones (19.10%), and Smartwatches (25.00%) offered moderate to high markdowns.

Notably, all Amazon products including Kindle, Echo, Echo Earbuds, Alexa, Fire TV, Fire TV Stick, and Fire Tablets, were aggressively discounted upwards of 30% this Prime Day. These products also came with the label “Climate Pledge Friendly.”

These aspects indicate Amazon’s push to promote its own ecosystem of products to the top, as well as cater to changing consumer preferences.

Apparel

Discounts offered this Prime Day increased from 13.2% in 2023 to 16.1% in 2024.

Amid apparel subcategories, Amazon appears to be pushing Women’s apparel categories more aggressively, particularly in Tops, Shoes, and Athleisure.

Women’s Shoes lead with the highest discounts at 26.50%, followed by Women’s Tops at 22.50% and Men’s Shoes at 22.80%. Women’s Tops also maintained the highest additional discount at 15.27%, followed by Women’s Athleisure at 13.03% and Men’s Swimwear at 12.44%.

Similar to 2023, Men’s Innerwear offered significantly lower discounts, with only 1% absolute discount and 0.72% additional discount. Women’s Innerwear also shows low discounts at 3.20% absolute and 2.23% additional.

Health & Beauty

Amid health & beauty subcategories, Moisturizes witnessed the highest markdowns at 20.10%, followed by Make Up at 18.90%. The Moisturizer subcategory also offers highest additional discounts at 12.20%, followed closely by Sunscreen at 10.25% and Beard Care at 10.22%.

The Toothpaste subcategory has the lowest discounts, at 10.90%. The lower discounts on everyday essentials like this might indicate a steady demand or an attempt to maintain margins on frequently purchased items.

Most Health & Beauty subcategories fall in the 15-18% range for actual discounts and 8-10% range for additional discounts. Electric Toothbrush (16.90% actual, 9.91% additional) and Shampoo (16.50% actual, 8.78% additional) represent the middle of the pack. There were a few highly attractive deals though, such as the Philips Sonicare toothbrush retailing at $122.96 (down from $199.99), with a 39% discount.

Amazon also offered significant discounts on Open Box products (products that are returned, but unused, out of mint condition boxes) to Prime members.

Home & Furniture

This category saw the lowest discounts for this Prime Day event at 13.1%. Across subcategories, Rugs lead with the highest average discount at 21.50%, closely followed by Luggage at 20.90%. Amazon seems to be pushing decorative and organizational items (Rugs, Bookcases) more aggressively, possibly due to higher margins. Rugs also stood out as the subcategory with the highest additional discount of 11.54%.

Sofas have the lowest additional discount at 2.76%, followed by Dining Tables at 3.21%. Items like Cabinets (15.80% absolute, 6.66% additional) and Coffee Tables (14.40% absolute, 6.25% additional) represent the middle range of discounts.

Watch Out For More

As the holiday season approaches, it’s clear that the retail landscape continues to evolve. While Amazon remains a formidable force, there are opportunities for savvy competitors to carve out their niches and attract deal-hungry shoppers. By analyzing these trends and adjusting strategies accordingly, retailers can position themselves for success in the high-stakes world of summer sales events.

Stay tuned to our blog for more insights on how Amazon’s competitors reacted to Prime Day, and how leading brands across categories fared in terms of their pricing and their visibility during the sale event. Reach out to us today to learn more.

July 20, 2024
How Monitoring and Analyzing End-User Prices can Help Retailers and Brands Gain a Competitive Edge
Retailers and brands are constantly engaged in a fierce battle over prices and discounts. Whether it’s major events like Amazon Prime Day, brand-led sales, or everyday price wars, they depend on pricing intelligence and digital shelf analytics to fine-tune their strategies. With a variety of offers such as sales, promotions, and bundles, determining the actual cost to the customer becomes a complex task. The price set by the brand, the retailer’s offer, and the final amount paid by the customer often vary significantly.

In their analysis, retailers and brands frequently focus on the listed price or the final sale price, overlooking a critical factor: the “end-user price.” This includes all discounts, taxes, and shipping costs, providing a more accurate picture of what customers are truly willing to pay at checkout.

Grasping this end-user price is vital for both retailers and brands. For retailers, it helps them stay competitive and refine their promotional strategies. For brands, it offers insights into competitive positioning, net revenue management, and shaping customer price perception.

However, emphasizing the end-user price is challenging, as it involves comprehending all the intricate elements of pricing.

How end-user pricing is calculated

The list price, also known as the manufacturer’s recommended retail price (MSRP), is the initial price set by the brand. This may not always be displayed on marketplaces, especially in categories like grocery. The selling price, on the other hand, is the amount at which a retailer offers the product, often reduced from the list price. The end-user price is the actual amount the customer pays at checkout, which includes taxes, promotions, and other factors that affect the final cost.

The process involves 3 key stages:

Step 1: Identifying and categorizing promotional offers

The first critical step in calculating end-user pricing is to identify and categorize the various promotional offers available for a given product that can reduce the final amount paid by the consumer. These promotions span a wide range of types:
- Bank Offers: Involving discounts or cash back incentives when paying with specific bank credit or debit cards. For instance, a customer may receive 10% cashback on their purchase by using a specific bank’s card.
- Bundled Deals: Combining multiple products or services at a discounted bundle price. A common example is a smartphone bundle including the phone itself, a protective case, and earphones at a reduced total cost.
- Promo Codes/Coupons: Customers can enter promo codes or coupons during checkout to unlock special discounted prices or percentage-off offers, like 20% off a hotel booking, or even a special brand discount personalized for their needs (think loyalty offers and in-app promotions).
- Shipping Offers: These include free shipping or reduced shipping fees for certain products or orders, such as free delivery on orders above a set amount.
- TPRs (Temporary Price Reductions): TPRs play a significant role in the strategies of most retailers. Brands and retailers use them to encourage shoppers to purchase more of a product or to try a new product they wouldn’t usually buy. A TPR involves reducing the price of a product by more than 5% from its regular shelf price.
By accurately identifying and classifying each type of promotion available, brands can then calculate the potential end-user pricing points.

Step 2: Accounting for location and fulfilment nuances (delivery, in-store pickup) that impact final pricing

Product pricing and promotional offers can vary based on the consumer’s location or ZIP code. Additionally, customers may opt for different fulfilment modes like delivery, shipping, or in-store pickup, which can further impact the final cost. Accurately calculating the end-user price necessitates considering these location-based pricing nuances as well as the chosen fulfilment method.

In the example below, the selling price is $4.32 for one retailer (on the left in the image) after a discount for online purchase. In another case with Meijer, the item total shows $17.91, but the consumer ends up paying $15.74 after taxes and fees are applied (on the right in the image).

Step 3: Applying each eligible promotion or offer to the selling price to determine potential end-user price points

With the various promotional offers and discounts categorized in the previous steps, retailers and brands can now apply each eligible promotion to the product’s selling price. This involves deducting percentages for bank cashback, implementing bundled pricing, applying coupon code discounts, and incorporating shipping promotions.

For retailers, this step allows them to calculate their true effective selling price to customers after all discounts and promotions. They can then compare this end-user price against competitors to ensure they remain competitively priced.

For brands, by systematically layering every applicable offer onto the baseline selling price, they can accurately calculate the multiple potential end-user price points a customer may pay at checkout for their products across different retailers and regions.

Why the end-user price matters

Optimizing pricing strategies using the end-user price can benefit retailers and brands in several ways:
- Price Competitiveness: By monitoring end-user pricing, retailers can adjust for discounts and promotional offers to attract customers, while brands can refine their pricing models to stay ahead in the market.
- Customer Acquisition and Loyalty: Offers, promotions, and discounts directly impact the final price paid by customers, playing a crucial role in attracting new customers and retaining existing ones. For example, Walmart’s competitive pricing in groceries boosts customer loyalty and repeat purchases.
- Consumer Perception: End-user pricing significantly shapes how consumers perceive both retailers and brands. Competitive pricing and promotional transparency enhance reputation and conversion rates. Amazon, for instance, is known for its competitive pricing and fast deliveries, which strengthen its consumer perception and satisfaction.
- Sales Volumes: The final checkout price influences affordability and perceived value, directly affecting sales volumes. Both retailers and brands benefit from understanding this, as it guides consumer purchasing decisions and drives revenue streams.
- Brand Perception: Consistent and transparent pricing enhances the perception of both the retailer and the brand. This not only strengthens the value proposition but also builds consumer trust and fosters long-term loyalty.
While the listed and selling prices are readily available, calculating the true end-user price is quite complex. It involves meticulous tracking and application of various types of promotions, offers, location-based pricing nuances, and fulfillment costs – an uphill task without robust technological solutions.

Track and Analyze end-user prices with DataWeave

DataWeave’s end-user price tracking capability empowers retailers and brands with the insights and tools necessary to comprehend the complexities of pricing dynamics. For retailers, it offers the ability to monitor end-user pricing across various products and categories compared to competitors, ensuring competitiveness after all discounts and enabling optimization of promotional strategies. Brands benefit from informed pricing decisions, optimized strategies across retail channels, and a strengthened position within their industries.

Our intuitive dashboard presents classified promotions and corresponding end-user prices across retailers, providing both retailers and brands with a transparent, comprehensive view of the end-user pricing landscape.

Within the detailed product view of DataWeave’s dashboard, the Price and Promotions panel showcases diverse promotions available across different retailers for each product, along with the potential end-user price post-promotions.

Harness the power of DataWeave’s sophisticated Pricing Intelligence and Digital Shelf Analytics to gain an accurate, real-time understanding of your end-user pricing dynamics. Make data-driven pricing decisions that resonate with customers and propel your brand toward sustained success.

Find out how DataWeave can empower your eCommerce pricing strategy – get in touch with us today or write to us at contact@dataweave.com!
May 15, 2024
Augmenting AI-powered Product Matching with Human Expertise to Achieve Unparalleled Accuracy
In today’s expansive omnichannel commerce landscape, pricing intelligence has become indispensable for retailers seeking to stay competitive and refine their pricing strategies. The sheer magnitude of eCommerce, spanning thousands of websites, billions of SKUs, and various form factors, adds layers of complexity. Consequently, ensuring the accuracy and reliability of competitive insights presents a formidable challenge for retailers aiming to leverage pricing data effectively.

At the core of any robust pricing intelligence system lies product matching. This process enables retailers to recognize identical or similar products across competitors. Once these matches are identified, tracking prices is a relatively more straightforward task, facilitating ongoing analysis and informed decision-making.

Accurate matching is crucial for meaningful price comparisons and tailoring product assortments. The challenge is matching products is often complicated, especially for non-local brands, niche categories, or items lacking consistent global identifiers. It becomes even trickier when trying to match very similar but not identical products. A comprehensive approach that compares and analyzes multiple attributes like product titles, descriptions, images and more is essential.

Artificial intelligence algorithms are commonly used to automate product matching, leveraging machine learning techniques to analyze patterns in images and text data. While AI can adapt and improve over time, the question remains: Can it fully address the complexities of product matching on its own?

The reality is that many retailers still struggle with incomplete, inaccurate, or outdated product data, despite these AI-powered product matching solutions. This can lead to suboptimal pricing decisions, missed opportunities, and reduced competitiveness.

Challenges in an ‘AI-only’ Approach to Product Matching

While AI plays a vital role in automated product matching solutions, there are complexities that AI alone cannot fully address:

Subjectivity in Matching Criteria

Some product categories have subjective or hard-to-quantify criteria for determining similarity. AI learns from historical data, so it may struggle with nuanced aspects like:

Aesthetics, style, and design: In the Fashion and Jewellery vertical, for example, products are matched according to attributes like style, aesthetics, design – all of which have some subjectivity involved.

Quantity/packaging variations: In the grocery sector, variations in product packaging and quantities can introduce complexities that require subjective decision-making. For example, apples may be sold in different packaging like a 0.5 kg bag or a pack of 4 individual apples. Determining if these different packaging options should be considered equivalent often involves making a qualitative judgment call, rather than a clear-cut objective decision.

Matching product sets: For categories like home furnishings, the focus is often on matching coordinated sets rather than individual items. For example, in the bedroom category, matching may involve grouping together an entire set of complementary furniture like a bed frame, dresser, and wardrobe based on their cohesive design and style. This goes beyond simply making one-to-one product associations, requiring more nuanced judgments about aesthetic coordination.

Contextual Factor

Products can have regional preferences, cultural differences, or evolving trends that impact how they are matched. AI may miss important context like Local/regional product names or distinct brand names across countries.

For instance, in the image we see Sprite (in the US) is branded Xubei in China. Continuous human curation is needed to help AI adapt to this context.

High Accuracy & Coverage Expectations

Retailers rely on AI powered and automated pricing adjustments based on product matching for insight. To ensure that pricing recommendations and updates are accurate, accurate product matching is crucial. For this, simply identifying similar top results is not enough – the process must comprehensively capture all relevant matches. While AI excels at finding the top groupings with around 80% accuracy, even small matching errors can have significant consequences.

As AI matching improves, customer expectations may rise even higher. If AI achieves 90% accuracy, for instance, SLAs may demand over 95%. Reaching such a high level of accuracy is very challenging for AI alone, especially when faced with incomplete data, contextual nuances, evolving trends, and subjective matching criteria across products and categories.

The solution is to combine the power of AI with human expertise. This is the key to achieving true data veracity – the accuracy, freshness, and comprehensive coverage required for precise and reliable product matching.

Human-in-the-Loop Approach for Elevated Product Matching

Human intelligence and quality testing can elevate the AI powered product matching process by addressing key challenges:
- Matching Validation: AI algorithms may identify product matches with 80-90% accuracy initially. Having humans validate these AI-suggested matches allows for correcting errors and pushing the accuracy close to 100%. As humans flag issues, provide context, and re-label incorrect predictions, it allows the AI model to learn and enhance its reliability for complex, high-stakes decisions.
- Applying Contextual Judgment: For subjective matching criteria like aesthetics, design, and categorizing product sets, human discernment is needed. Humans can make nuanced judgments beyond just quantitative rules, ensuring meaningful apples-to-apples product comparisons. Their contextual understanding augments AI’s capabilities.
- Continuous Learning Via Feedback Loop: Product experts possess rich category knowledge across markets. Integrating this human insight through an iterative feedback loop helps AI models quickly learn and adapt to changing trends, preferences, and context. As humans explain their match assessments, the AI continuously enhances its precision over time.
By combining AI’s automation and scale with human validation, judgment, and knowledge curation, pricing intelligence solutions can achieve the accuracy and coverage demanded for actionable competitive pricing insights.

DataWeave’s Data Veracity Framework: A Scalable Workflow Combining AI and Human Expertise

Given the vast number of products, retailers, and brands that exist today, any product matching solution must be highly scalable. At DataWeave, we bring you such a scalable workflow to address these complexities by integrating human expertise with AI-driven automation. The image below outlines our approach for combining AI with human intelligence in a seamless, scalable workflow for accurate product matching:

Retailers and brands can benefit in several ways with this workflow, as listed below.

Several Rounds of Data Verification Due to Hierarchical Validation Teams

The workflow employs a hierarchical validation team of Leads and Executives to efficiently integrate human expertise without creating bottlenecks. Verification Leads play a pivotal role in managing the distribution of product matches identified by DataWeave’s AI model to the Verification Executives.

The Executives then meticulously validate these AI-suggested matches, adding any missing product associations and removing inaccurate matches. After validation, the matched product groups are sent back to the Leads, who perform random sampling checks to ensure quality.

Throughout this entire workflow, feedback and suggestions are continuously gathered from both the Executives and Leads. This curated input is then incorporated back into DataWeave’s AI model, allowing it to learn and improve its matching accuracy on an ongoing basis.

This hierarchical structure ensures that human validation seamlessly scales alongside the AI’s matching capabilities. Leveraging the respective strengths of AI automation and human expertise in an iterative feedback loop prevents operational bottlenecks while steadily elevating overall accuracy.

Confidence-based Distribution of Matched Articles for Validation

The AI model assigns confidence scores, differentiating high-confidence (>95%) and low-confidence matches. For high-confidence groups, executives simply remove incorrect matches – a quicker process. Low-confidence matches require more human effort in adding/removing matches.

As the AI model improves over time with feedback, the share of high-confidence matches increases, making validation more efficient and swift.

Automated, Standardized Process with Iterative Feedback Loop

The entire workflow is standardized and automated, with verification metrics seamlessly tracked. At each step, feedback captured from both leads and executives flows back into the AI, enhancing its matching accuracy and coverage iteratively.

DataWeave’s closed-loop system of AI automation with hierarchical human validation allows product matching to achieve comprehensive accuracy at a vast scale.

Unleash the Power Accurate and Comprehensive Product Matching

In summary, combining AI and human expertise in product matching is crucial for retailers navigating the complexities of omnichannel retail. While AI algorithms excel in automation, they often struggle with subjective criteria and contextual nuances. DataWeave’s approach integrates AI-driven automation with human validation, delivering the industry’s most accurate product matching capabilities, enabling actionable competitive pricing insights.

To learn more, reach out to us today!
May 2, 2024
The Rapid Rise of Alcohol eCommerce in the UK
Alcohol eCommerce has been rapidly growing over the years, and like a lot of other industries, the pandemic accelerated its growth. Convenience, safety & home delivery became important criteria for customers in the post pandemic era and so the sale of alcohol via eCommerce went up. Kantar reported that UK booze sales were up £261m & online and convenience stores were the biggest winners. The latest IWSR Drinks Market Analysis Report 2022 reported on another interesting trend – when ordering alcohol online, consumers prefer using websites v/s apps in most parts of the world except China and Brazil. In the UK the largest chunk of online alcohol purchases happens on a retailer website instead of an app.

Platform used for last online alcohol purchase. Source

To get a better understanding of this, we tracked 2 grocery retailers and 3 grocery Q-Commerce apps in the UK to get insights into Alcohol sales, pricing, trends & more!

Methodology
- Data Scrape time period: Feb 2022 – June 2022
- Grocery Retailers tracked: Tesco & Ocado
- Grocery Apps tracked: Gorillas, Weezy & Getir
- Category tracked: Alcohol
Which retailer was the Price Leader in the alcohol category?

Before the pandemic Tesco was the only Big 4 retailer to increase their alcohol market share & Waitrose was the biggest loser, with its share of booze sales falling from 5.4% to 4.7%. Maintaining Price Leadership is a critical element and plays a big role in increasing sales & market share because consumers will buy the most competitively priced product. We wanted to track and see which retailer was the Price Leader in the alcohol category – i.e., had the most number of lower-priced items in the alcohol category. We also wanted to see if & how Tesco’s position had changed post pandemic.

Price Leadership
- Tesco enjoyed price leadership in the Alcohol category from Feb – June 2022 with 38.9% products priced the lowest. This, followed by Ocado at 33.8%. Gorillas had price leadership for the least amount of products in the alcohol category at 5.6%. Tesco was the clear winner!
- Tesco’s Price Leadership kept declining through the months though – at the beginning of the year in Feb, Tesco had 44% products priced the lowest but by June, that number fell to a little over 36%. Ocado showed a reverse trend – in Feb they had price leadership on 32% items and by June that number rose to 35.3%.
- One player Tesco could’ve potentially lost price leadership to was Getir. In Feb, Getir had price leadership on only 8.2% products but that increased gradually over the months to land on 14.5% in June.
Which retailers focused on Discounts to perk up alcohol sales?

Discounts are a great way to draw in inflation-hit shoppers. Loyalty card discounts, reward vouchers, and other promotional strategies retailers offer help make their products more competitive & attractive to customers. To stay competitive, retailers need to be aware of the discounts their competition is offering. They also need to understand the risk of deep discounting and the impact on margins. We wanted an insight into alcohol related discounts in the UK so we dug into our data. Here’s what we saw.

Average discounts across months by retailers
- A host of European and UK based startups like Jiffy, Dija, Weezy, Zapp, Getir & Gorillas launched with the promise of delivering groceries the fastest & cheapest.
- Our data showed that Gorillas offered discounts in line with the competition, however, Getir likely went the deep discounting route.
- Getir offered the highest discounts across all months. And in the month of April they offered almost 9% more discount than Ocado – the retailer with the 2^nd highest discounts.
  Like we discussed above, Getir gained price Leadership from Feb to June. Deep discounting could have potentially played a role.
- Gorillas on the other hand had the lowest, almost non-existent discounts.
Let’s look at Price Index trends across 5 months

We tracked the Price Index (PI) across these 5 retailers to measure how alcohol prices changed over a 5 month period from Feb – June 2022.

Note: Retailers selling at the 100% mark were selling at an optimal price & did not undercut the market. The pricing sweet spot is 95% – 105%. Anything lower would compromise margins, and higher would mean the retailer was not competitive.

Price Index across months by retailers
- Weezy had a Price Index that was the most optimal, sitting in the 100% – 102% range.
- Gorillas had the lowest Price Index, between 89% – 91%.
- Getir had a low price index in Feb (96.1%) but slowly kept increasing to cross 110% in April, May & June.
- What was interesting to see was the competition between the 2 retail giants Ocado & Tesco. Ocado had a lower price index at the start of the year at 105.1%, while Tesco was at 109.8%. In the subsequent months, Ocado kept increasing prices to be competitive with Tesco and Tesco decreased prices to likely match Ocado’s pricing. By June BOTH Tesco & Ocado had the exactly the same price index – 108.7%
Which retailers were the quickest to make price changes?

Competitive pricing is critical to eCommerce success. Competitive pricing involves tracking your competitor’s pricing & strategically tweaking your own prices without hurting margins. We tracked the month-wise average Price change from Feb – June across all 5 retailers to see which retailer was making price changes and at what frequency.

Average price change across months by retailers
- Most retailers did not make massive prices changes, they were ballpark competitive with each other from a pricing standpoint.
- However, Gorillas made significant changes in the month of March when they dropped prices by 3.8% and in May when they increased prices by 5.5%!
- In May, the same month Gorillas made a big price hike, Weezy dropped their prices significantly by 10% widening the gap between the 2 retailers.
Which retailers avoided lost sales by maintaining stock availability?

Having a near real time view on stock availability is crucial to driving sales. Customers can buy products only when they’re available! So, we went ahead, looked into our data to see how each of these retailers managed stock availability from Feb to June.

Average availability across months by retailers
- Our data showed varying availability levels across retailers with Ocado having the highest availability across all 5 months. They had a robust stock at the beginning of the year at 100% but kept dwindling through the months to land at 95.8% by June.
- Tesco had a sharp drop in availability in May & June – from 97% at the beginning of the year to the 92-93% range.
- Gorillas had the lowest availability across months between 90 & 94%.
- Weezy consistently maintained availability at 95% across all 5 months.
Conclusion

For the most part, the UK market has a positive outlook towards buying alcohol online thanks to changes to shopper behavior arising from the pandemic. As per the IWSR Drinks Market Analysis Report 2022 in website-led markets, such as the UK, breadth of product range is important to customers along with price. These 2 play a key factor in purchase decisions. By contrast, consumers in app-driven markets have different preferences. While price matters, it is less important than convenience and speed.

As an alcohol retailer, if you need help tracking your competitor prices, discounts and product assortment, reach out to the team at DataWeave to learn how we can help!
September 5, 2022
U.S. Prime Day Deals 2022: Promotion Intelligence First Look

As inflation hits another 40-year high at 9.1 percent, U.S. consumers geared up for their first sign of hope and relief in the form of anticipated discount buys – 2022 Amazon Prime Days, or so we thought. While Prime Days have grown to become a promotional period almost as important as Black Friday to digital shoppers, the combination of economic uncertainty, inflationary pressures, and supply chain challenges seemed to alter the discount strategy expected given activity seen during 2021 Prime Days.

Our analyst team has been hard at work aiming to provide a ‘first look’ at 2022 Prime Day Promotional Insights, tracking discounts offered across 46,000+ SKUs within key categories like Electronics, Clothing, Health & Beauty and Home, on seven major retailer websites – Amazon, Target, Best Buy, Sephora, Ulta, Lowe’s and Home Depot. Our analysis compares prices seen during Amazon Prime Day 2022 on July 12^th, to pre-Prime Day maximum value prices seen in the ten days leading up to Prime Days, to determine the average change in discounts offered during the promotional period. Below is a summary of our findings.

Competitive Promotions Give Amazon a Run for their Money

Amazon offered the greatest average discount enhancements for Electronics at 5.6 percent followed by Health & Beauty items at 5.1 percent, and Home products at 4.2 percent versus pre-Prime Day discounts seen across the categories considered within our analysis. The only category reviewed where average discounts were greater on a competitor’s website was on Target.com within the Clothing category. As seen below, Clothing on Target.com average discounts were 6.8 percent greater than pre-Prime Day offers, which was 2.6 percent higher than the average discounts offered for Clothing on Amazon.

Target Capitalizes on Growth Opportunity in Clothing Category

Diving deeper into the details of where Target won within the Clothing category, you can see a majority of their promotional activity took place within Women’s Accessories where discounts offered were 18.5 percent greater than those seen pre-Prime Day 2022, which was almost 15 percent greater than the discount enhancements seen on Amazon for Women’s Accessories. In fact, Women’s Shoes and Sneakers were the only two categories where the average discounts offered were greater on Amazon than on Target.com.

Overall, the discounts offered on Target.com within the Clothing category were primarily concentrated within items priced $40 and lower, but what was most interesting is that within the $10 and under price bucket, Target offered average discounts of over 11 percent whereas Amazon increased prices for these items on average by over 9 percent.

While most of the Clothing available on both Amazon and Target.com during Prime Days 2022 were offered without a price change, the greatest discount percentages tracked were within the range of 10-25 percent off on Amazon whereas Target chose to offer the bulk of their promotions at 25 percent off an up.

Strategic Promotional Strategies Defined at the Electronics Subcategory Level

When it comes to the Electronics category on Prime Day, the big question is always who will win the battle of the brands. Below shows the difference in average pricing and promotions discounts offered between products manufactured by Samsung versus Apple across each retailer platform, noting discounts were almost 3 percent greater on average for Apple versus Samsung products on Amazon, and Apple discounts were almost 5 percent greater on Amazon versus than those seen on Target.com.

Amazon wasn’t going all in on Apple however, as we saw ‘Alexa’ devices (Amazon products) available on Best Buy and Target websites also, but the discounts were almost 4 percent greater on Amazon versus Target and over 7 percent greater than the discounts seen on BestBuy.com.

While the average discounts offered within the Electronics category were greatest on Amazon (5.6 percent) versus Best Buy (3.9 percent) and Target (3.4 percent) as noted within the first chart of this blog and across brands and technologies considered above, the discounts offered on Amazon were strategically focused between 10-25 percent as seen below.

Amazon’s Electronics promotions were also targeted at smaller price points, items priced between $20-500, whereas Best Buy and Target offered greater promotions for electronics priced $500 and up than Amazon.

Below is a snapshot of price buckets tracked for Electronics available on BestBuy.com, highlighting where most of the promotional activity was targeted at products priced $50 and up during Prime Days 2022, with discounts ranging from 10 percent up to greater than 25 percent greater than pre-Prime day prices.

The standout categories were TVs on Target.com with discounts averaging nearly 12 percent greater than those seen pre-Prime day, and smartphones on BestBuy.com with discounts averaging just over 11 percent greater than those seen pre-Prime Day. The category with the greatest average discount enhancements seen on Amazon during Prime Days 2022 was for Wireless Headphones with an average discount of 8.7 percent.

Home is Where Amazon’s Heart Was on Prime Day

Amazon dominated offers within the Home categories, especially for products within mid ($40-100) and higher price ranges (items priced $200-500), with the bulk of the discounts offered between 10-25 percent. There was little to no promotional activity seen across all price points on Lowe’s or Home Depot’s websites within the categories we tracked, and most other competitive offers on Home products were seen on BestBuy.com for products priced from $50-500. Even a subcategory like Tools offered deeper average discounts on Amazon (4.7 percent) than discounts seen on HomeDepot.com (1.1 percent) or Lowes.com (0 percent).

For Large Appliances, Amazon was the only retailer to off any significant discount across each major subcategory with the greatest average discount being on Ovens at 6 percent, followed by Refrigerators at 4 percent. One caveat with this category, when we reviewed Large Appliance prices two weeks prior to Prime Days, we saw average price increases around 16.7 percent occurring on Amazon.

During Prime Days 2022 however, Amazon also offered top average discounts for small appliances, except for on Instant Pots which appeared to have greater average discounts on Target.com (5.9 percent versus 4.2 percent on Amazon), and Vacuum Cleaners which appeared to have the best promotion of appliances small and large at 13.8 percent average discount on BestBuy.com. Another subcategory deeply discounted on BestBuy.com was weighted blankets, which averaged discounts around 18.5 percent versus Amazon’s average discount at only 6.2 percent.

Health & Beauty Retailer Pricing Strategies Revealed

Given the importance Health & Beauty Brands placed on Prime Day sales last year, we had anticipated to see more offers, especially within pure-play beauty retail channels, than we did for this booming category.

Amazon drove most of the Health & Beauty offers seen averaging 5.1% discounts versus other retailers only offering less than 1% on average, but discounts were aimed at a targeted group of SKUs on Amazon, bringing the average discount lower overall. Most of the promotions offered on Amazon fell within mid-range price points ($20-50) and were discounted between 10-25 percent versus pre-Prime Day prices.

Target.com offered the most comparable discounts to Amazon for Health & Beauty products on average, but their strategy primarily focused on items within the $20 and lower price range with discounts ranging primarily between 10-25 percent.

More 2022 Prime Day Insights Coming Soon

We know the significance visibility to critical pricing and promotional insights play in enabling retailers and brands to offer the right discounts to stay competitive, especially during promotional periods like Prime Days. While this blog is intended to provide a ‘sneak peek’ into 2022 Prime Day insights for the U.S. market, we will be providing more extensive, global coverage and will proactively share new insights with the marketplace as they become available throughout the month of July.

Be sure to also check out our Press page for access to the latest media coverage on Prime Day insights and more. Don’t hesitate to reach out to our team if there is any particular category you are interested in seeing in more detail, or for access to more information on our Commerce Intelligence and Digital Shelf solutions.

July 14, 2022