It’s no mystery: You can learn a lot about a competitor by browsing its Web store. But retail consulting firm A. McEvoy & Associates LLC of New York has taken the concept a step further and created an unusual interactive service, called Nanotrap, that automatically extracts and analyzes assortment and price data from Web stores.
Merchants at specialty retailers in such areas as beauty and apparel can use the service to gather competitive data to supplement and augment their store visits, said company founder and chief executive officer Annette McEvoy.
A. McEvoy & Associates extracts data from any site a customer requests, and clients can view and manipulate the data in an Excel spreadsheet and generate customized reports.
Clients can see such information as how many departments a retailer has, the number of stockkeeping units per department, average unit price, minimum and maximum prices in a department, average markdowns, how many items are on sale and what percent of a retailer’s goods are private label versus brands. Product descriptions and pictures are included, and the spreadsheet contains live links to relevant areas of the online stores.
The service makes it easy to compare data across retailers. For example, a user could see how much competitors charge for a single item, such as wooden hangers, and which retailers have the highest and lowest prices for that item, in a category or in general.
Subscribers can look at data in the aggregate, or can drill down to a single sku. They can also keep the data and analyze it over time.
Once the information is in hand, a merchant can draw such conclusions as how well a retailer is doing, its position in the market and its overall strategy. For example, a retailer with an average markdown of 22 percent but very few items on sale is probably doing well, said McEvoy. Lots of unplanned markdowns — often indicated by multiple reductions per item — tell another story.
Not every retailer carries identical assortments online and in stores, but the two worlds are becoming more similar all the time, McEvoy said. While Nanotrap will not replace store visits, it is more qualitative, accurate, and less anecdotal and impressionistic, she added.
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Potential customers and longtime associates of McEvoy who had seen the service spoke highly of it.
“This is so integral to our business, and it’s a tool that goes well beyond what we’ve been able to do in the past,” said a senior merchandising executive for a large chain specialty retailer. (Company policy prevented him from being identified by name.) “It’s something that would make a lot of sense for us,” he said, although he added that he did not know if his company had plans to subscribe.
A retail consultant at a small firm who also declined to give her name said her clients would find the service useful. “I have a client who is a specialty retailer and really wants to look at the competition and understand what they’re doing in terms of pricing strategy, assortment, and which products are moving and which aren’t,” she said. She noted that several existing services offer pricing and sales volume data on consumer packaged goods, but said she has seen nothing similar for specialty retailers.
Nanotrap’s ability to aggregate data so merchants can track price-change trends and estimate margins appealed to Patti Freeman Evans, an e-commerce analyst with market research firm Jupiter Research Inc. of New York, who said she has not seen another tool like it. She cautioned that she had not been briefed on Nanotrap, but based her comments on a reporter’s description. “That’s much richer data than sending someone to the store or just looking online,” she said. “That can be useful at an anecdotal level, but you can take the statistics you get from something like this and [compare it with] your recent strategies and see if you’re in line, ahead of the game or behind the game,” she said.
It took A. McEvoy & Associates about nine months to develop Nanotrap. It is based on a SQL Server database and a Web crawler that the firm customized with its own proprietary logic. There is an initial Web site setup fee of $3,500 for the service, and ongoing weekly data is available for $500 per run for a single Web store. The name “Nanotrap” refers to the minute particles of data the tool captures, said Joshua Berkson, chief technology officer for the firm.