Is Web Scraping Driving Nectar’s 20% MoM Ecomm Growth?

Last fall,CNBC explained how online mattress retailer Nectar was using a variety of Big Data techniques to grow 20% every month. Having booked $35M sales in less than a year, Nectar clearly knows how to find customers. We think web scraping is one of the keys to its success.  

This growth in a crowded market is clearly impressive and driven by Nectar’s acute attention to data. We’re data experts, too, and thought it would be useful to share with you what we think Nectar is doing. The challenge is to gather and analyze data from which it can make strategic and tactical decisions, including targeting site visitors with the elusive goal of all ecommerce retailers – the right message delivered at the right time.

Here’s how we think Nectar may have built the foundation of its Big Data program. Every ecommerce business―including yours―can do the same thing using Mozenda software. Once created, it’s easy to update the data and boost the bottom line of your own company.

1. Scrape Your Competitors’ Prices.

Mozenda’s web scraping software is a cost-and time-effective way to stay informed about your competitors’ pricing strategies, tactical merchandising, current prices, price changes and incentives. Scraping your competitors’ prices is one of the simplest and most effective ways companies can use Big Data. It falls sharply into the no-brainer, everyone-should-be-doing-it category.

Here’s the pricing data we scraped from Nectar’s principal competitors. Our software makes it simple to create a report comprising everyone’s prices for quick and easy reference.

Plan on 10-15 min. to create agents for the sites you want to scrape. After they run, you can export your competitor’s prices or email them (to yourself or anyone else) in a few clicks. To keep your competitive research database current, you can schedule agents to run on a regular schedule.

2. Does Geography Affect Pricing?

Mozenda can help you understand whether competitor’s prices vary based on location.  Knowing how location influences your competitors’ pricing will help you develop your own regional pricing strategies in response. Mozenda’s geolocation filtering capabilities makes this information easily accessible.

Highly granular and nuanced pricing data helps every retailer. Mozenda offers 33 different regions and countries to localize your research. For example, you can easily compare prices in the United States versus the United Kingdom, or Germany versus France. This information will  help you set competitive rates specific to each country. Is Nectar doing geo-analysis? We don’t know but it would certainly make sense if it was, say, considering opening up sales channels in Australia.

3. Online Reviews: What Are Consumers Saying About Your Competitors?

Monitor your competition’s reviews. Tracking what customers say about you has always been massively important. In the Mozenda version of Big Data, we make it as simple to use web scraping to track your customers’ public comments as we do to monitor reviews of your competitors. With Mozenda, you can scrape your competitor’s reviews, filter and compare them based on your preferred criteria, then analyze the information to identify their weaknesses and your opportunities.

In our Nectar analysis, a quick review of a competitor’s negative reviews reveals that pain points among their customers include price, customer service shortcomings, and complaints from side sleepers. Duly educated, Nectar can now consider using these weaknesses in its sales and marketing activities.  

4. Improving Competitive Research Using Web Automation

The rewards of Big Data analysis diminish if collecting the data requires a massive amount of resources. If the web scraping software is difficult to use, both in configuration and on-going use, the success of your web scraping project will disappoint. Ensuring employee efficiency is, therefore, an important contributor. This means helping them spend less time gathering the data and more time analyzing and acting on the findings.

Mozenda can be used to replace most activities where a person is completing repetitive, predictable, and known tasks on the Internet. Bottom line, Mozenda can be used to mimic human behavior online. Here are two examples; a Quality Control (QC) or Quality Assurance (QA) activity that’s increasingly useful if you’re adding lots of SKUs to your database, and a Human Relations (HR) example if you have to hire quickly like Nectar’s obviously had to do.

• Use Mozenda tools to test website forms and shopping cart checkout processes. Our web automation tool can easily and accurately go through a site’s checkout processes or any process that involves a form to validate updates and to quickly catch bugs.

Place job postings. HR teams at growing companies are typically very busy finding the best talent. They often do this by casting a wide net when sourcing potential candidates. Mozenda automation tools can dramatically improve the efficiency of your HR team by automatically posting multiple job postings on multiple sites. No more hours spent hitting “Ctrl + C” and “Ctrl + V.”

 

These are but two of the many ways Mozenda automation tools can help improve your business and employees efficiency. Depending on the scale, Mozenda’s web automation tools can generate tens of thousands of dollars for you in annual productivity savings.

Big Data Analysis Doesn’t Mean Big Risk For You

These are just a few ideas about how Nectar may be gathering the Big Data necessary to keep its sales numbers upwards and to the right. Fortunately for you, you can do exactly the same thing. We’ll show you how during a free trial of our technology during which we guarantee your success. For more information, Call +1 (801) 995-4550, email (sales@mozenda.com) or Sign up today!