Detail Online helps brands audit their products on their retailers’ websites. The brands (mostly based in Europe and the United States), come to us to get information about how their products are displayed online, and we help them make sure they’re presented in the way they were intended to be. A lot of brands did this manually before, and they only did it occasionally.
Since we have automated the process, they can now get a daily report on how their products are presented in the e-commerce landscape. For the brands, these daily reports are really important because it could be simple things – like products not being visible, or wrong product descriptions, images, or title specifications, all of which could affect their sales as well as the retailers’ sales. Therefore, it’s critical that all the product information is presented correctly. In our experience, 40% of product descriptions/details are listed incorrectly every day. The worst part is that even companies that are syndicating their content see this problem; it might be correct on day one but on day two/three/or four, certain details can go missing.
Initially, our customers were mainly big consumer electronic brands, but we now have customers in the fashion industry as well as fast-moving consumer goods companies. However, we are the strongest among the consumer electronic brands, as the technical specifications there are so specific. Again, anything missing/incorrect could really affect sales.
Our first client was a Consumer Electronics Company. They approached us with a simple problem: One retailer was promoting one of their TVs with three HDMI chords when, in fact, they only had two. This became a big problem because a lot of people bought this TV online and were disappointed and consequently sent it back.
We recently had a meeting with a new client, a ketchup brand, during which we discussed the visibility issue. The problem that they see is the lifetime value of something. The client gave the following example: “What if your ketchup is out of stock one day, or there’s an issue with the algorithm on the site and your ketchup isn’t showing up. Then a customer is forced to buy a different brand’s ketchup – and what if your kids like that brand better? That may mean that you haven’t just lost that one sale, but you’ve lost a lifetime of sales from that customer.”
Joakim Gavelin and I started in 2015. He was the one who brought on our first client. He got the call about the TV issue I described earlier, and he understood that this is only the tip of the iceberg. He had two guys surfing around on their laptops trying to identify these mistakes, but he very soon discovered that only in the Nordics there were more than 1.2 million data points that needed to be checked daily or weekly, so it simply wasn’t possible. That’s when he called me, and we set up the system from there.
We handled the company with our “left hand” for around three years until 2018, when we got a huge customer. It was then that we realized that this wasn’t just a side business for us. We found two large investors – and that’s when we started for real.
We use the Bright Data Web Unlocker and we’ve been with Bright Data since August 2017. We have retailers that would like us to have an API, but we really need to view these sites from a consumer perspective. You never know what could have changed between the creation of the database and the front-end. Also, some clients want us to collect data from their own sites, but their IT departments/security departments are not willing to whitelist IPs.
We tried a lot of different data collection platforms, but no one offered the “whole package” in terms of what we needed and what we were looking for. I also really liked the fact that Bright Data takes ethics and ethical data collection seriously, as it aligns with our own company values. I have a great relationship with my account manager, and I appreciate that we can talk about the price levels as we use the platform more and more. Bright Data enables us to get the real user experience for the client and see the web as a regular consumer. Also, it’s easy to use, and it’s good value for money.
