Food for Thought
A Look Forward and a Look Back - Datasembly 2023 Update
Feb 16, 2023
While we have only just begun 2023, Datasembly is already hard at work shaping new tools and advancing existing technologies to help bring even more clarity and insight to the competitive retail marketplace. And the investments we have planned in 2023 are only possible due to the milestones we achieved in 2022 - one of our best years yet!
Here’s a quick look back at a few of the more popular items we introduced along with new details about upcoming releases in Data Collection, Data Enrichment and Insight Delivery offerings.
We’ve seen that the more comprehensive and real-time the data collection is, the more detailed, actionable, and timely the insights are. We’ve continued to invest in this area and have made strides in adding new retailers from which we collect, as well as improvements in our underlying collection platform to increase reliability.
We now collect from Chedraui (major Mexican retailer), Rural King, Blain’s Farm & Fleet and have added Save-A-Lot and Jerry’s County Markets to our collections from Instacart. We’ve also introduced adaptive technologies that allow our proprietary collections engine to self-adjust to more quickly combat anti-bot technologies. We’ve seen that customers are also choosing to access our collections at a higher frequency due to increased market volatility and we’ve made it easier for them to do so.
We will continue to invest in next gen tooling to enhance our collection capability with both speed and reliability. We’ll be developing new proxying techniques as well as expanding monitoring & alerting to allow Datasembly to more quickly react to events like site changes. We will be adding new retailers to our library of collections as well.
Additionally, we will be collecting more data attributes across multiple retailers to provide even more product details to our customers. Look for new collection health monitoring dashboards that we will begin introducing to customers as well.
Our comprehensive collection provides insight where it was previously unavailable. That’s the inspiration behind our data enrichment plans and the driver for the introduction of our new service, Datasembly’s Product Matching for private label products. With the largest base of high quality private label product matches (growing daily) we’re creating instant clarity into the competitive product landscape and keeping it fresh through our match maintenance engine.
We’ll extend our matching capabilities to map national products to retailers who don’t allow us to collect UPCs (mainly Instacart-only banners). We are also improving our matching for variable weight products and making additional improvements to more effectively maintain existing matches.
Last year was a busy year for new products and new package sizing. This is a very difficult thing to keep in front of with lag associated with data from syndicated sources. Keep an eye out for the introduction of our new capabilities to help you detect new products in the categories that you care about the most.
This will help our CPG customers understand how their new products are being rolled out by their retail partners but also give them an early warning system to detect new competitive threats.
For our web application, in 2022, we introduced a few usability enhancements like our new Universal Product Search and the ability to create your own custom product groupings and favorites. We’ve also created new “Labs” pages (Product Group Price Trends, Product Group Comparisons) that are tailored to provide quick insights into specific use cases.
Behind the scenes we’ve installed a completely new delivery platform that improves the reliability, speed, and scalability of our exports and recently completed the seamless migration of all of our customer’s exports to that platform.
We’ve also begun to roll out capabilities that make it easier for customers to update their hierarchies that support our app and exports and created self service capabilities so that you can update your hierarchies easily and more frequently. We will be rolling that out more broadly in the coming months.
We will introduce a new concept in our app and data to enable the support of a customer’s PPGs (Product Price/Promotion Groups) and use those PPGs within our Labs pages. To provide better visibility into a growing issue, we are also introducing a new Labs page to allow you to see Out of Stock trends in your categories. Additional Labs pages to support more specific use cases will also be introduced in 2023. You will also see sharable public product groups and SSO (single sign-on) capabilities to make it easier for our users to access our app.
We will also be making significant improvements to our export capabilities. This includes standardized, configurable exports and more documentation and education tools about our data and best practices on how to integrate our data into your environments. We will also start to roll out additional, specialized exports that deliver pre-calculated insights.
We are also excited about working on a new way of getting Datasembly to our customers through data sharing via our partnership with Snowflake. This gives customers a more direct view of our data, making it more real-time, and avoiding the complexities of transporting large amounts of data that are associated with the traditional export process.