Pricing Optimization
Competitor Prices
The advent of e-commerce has yielded unprecedented access to competitive pricing data. Finding out what the competition is charging for a particular product is as easy as shopping on their website. The trouble is, with hundreds to thousands of SKUs in the typical online catalog, collecting prices by hand is impractical. QL2 fully automates the process of gathering product information, pricing and availability from online stores.
Using intelligent agents, QL2 can programmatically crawl through website(s) to retrieve product information you need. WebQL® can even fill out advanced search forms and set parameter values to reach deep or dynamic web pages that are inaccessible to traditional crawlers. If a human shopper can navigate to a product page, so can QL2's technology.
Regardless of the format, QL2 has the ability to parse any web page and mine prices and other product details. Using optical character recognition (OCR), QL2 can even extract information embedded in images and convert it to plain text.
Market Factors
A wealth of market and environmental factors that influence prices, valuations and forecasts, can be tracked on the web. QL2 can turn virtually any data posted on the web into a live data feed to power your pricing algorithms and financial models.
With advanced data transformation capabilities, QL2 can output the information it collects from the web according to the specifications of your existing systems and internal tools.
Supply Chain Dynamics
Suppliers typically provide a self-service web interface as the primary means for bid desks, purchasing agents and inventory managers to access crucial information. That's fine if you only have one supplier, but more likely you have several all delivering data to you in different formats, XML feeds, web based reports, Excel spreadsheets and databases.
QL2 consolidates data across different suppliers by creating custom data feeds from their existing websites, APIs or databases. Regardless of the source or native format, QL2 can standardize the data and integrate it into a single, unified application with ease.