CIO Bulletin

An innovator enabling organizations to gain intelligence, and competitive advantage from vast amount of data: Import.io

Data integration brings together data gathered from different systems and makes it more valuable for your business. It helps your people work better with each other and do more for your customers. Without data integration, you have no way of accessing the data gathered in one system in another. For example, you might gather customer data in your CRM, which nobody outside your sales and marketing can access. Inevitably, other teams will want to access that data at times, perhaps when fulfilling an order or dealing with credit accounts. This leads to data being shared manually, via spreadsheets, emails and phone calls. And when that happens, mistakes are inevitable. With data integration, information is shared seamlessly between systems. Staff can access ERP data in your CRM system and vice-versa. Mistakes are eliminated, everyone in your business has the data they need to perform at their best and you get the best possible value out of the systems you already have. As the largest data source on earth and growing, web data provides incredible value. Import.io enables any organization to gain intelligence, efficiencies, and competitive advantages from the vast amount of data on the web. For today’s retailers and manufacturers, data represents a key strategic asset. Moving forward, those organizations that can most effectively harness data will be the ones best positioned for success. Today, the web represents the largest database, and the intelligence it contains represents a massive opportunity—offering a way for teams to better understand and predict industry trends and make more informed product and pricing decisions. However, to capitalize on this opportunity, organizations can’t rely on legacy web scraping tools and tactics. With Import.io, organizations can leverage a comprehensive Web Data Integration solution that makes it fast, easy, and affordable to maximize the strategic value of web data. This solution enables retail and manufacturing professionals to identify, extract, prepare, integrate, and consume web data. With these capabilities, Import.io delivers the high quality, timely, and extensive intelligence you need to outperform competitors and stay on top of dynamic markets.

Gain Competitive Advantage

The nature of the pricing analysts job has changed dramatically in recent years. Gone are the days when teams of analysts would have to travel from store to store to gather pricing information. Now, analysts can capture all the data they need online, but that doesn’t mean the job is easy. Most retailers have many competitors and thousands of SKUs to track—and data is changing constantly. Manually gathering pricing data from multiple competitors’ websites is time consuming and error prone. In addition, competitor price monitoring needs to happen very regularly to feed a pricing strategy that stays ahead of the competition. Import.io can help by automatically and routinely gathering data from any ecommerce website. Import.io can match your merchandise with competitors’ offerings by capturing data on categories, brands, prices, and other parameters. For even more time savings, Import.io offers change reports that make it easy to see when prices have changed and when products have been added or removed.

For manufacturers, it’s important to monitor retailer channels to gain insights on product performance and whether partners are adhering to minimum advertised price (MAP) agreements. If teams have to rely solely on manual checks of every website in which relevant products are listed, it is virtually impossible to ensure compliance with MAP policies. Import.io automates this function by providing a complete analysis of all products and prices, delivering automated alerts on price changes that can be generated hourly, daily, and weekly. Import.io also captures a time-stamped snapshot of a website to provide proof of compliance or non-compliance. When you monitor competitor pricing and MAP compliance over multiple websites, you need to have confidence that you are matching accurately on an individual product level. With Import.io, you can employ intelligent and accurate product matching, collecting data on your inventory and automatically finding the same products on competitor websites. The solution uses machine learning to minimize incorrect matches and it automatically and routinely updates product matches in order to reflect ongoing changes to product inventory. Retailers, manufacturers of consumer goods, and hospitality businesses all have customer reviews on multiple websites. It’s easy to access the reviews and see overall average scores, but this only offers limited intelligence. What if the aggregate scores are the same across competitors? For example, what if every 12-cup automatic coffee maker has four stars, or every large hotel in a certain market has three stars? It’s time-consuming and difficult to read through 100s of reviews in order to determine what differentiates various offerings, let alone to gain actionable intelligence based on all this information. Import.io offers a way to simplify this effort. Initially, Import.io can easily generate a spreadsheet based on every review on every website. Import.io can then enable intelligent comparisons between businesses, for example, based on keywords in customer reviews.

Fuel Your Sales And Marketing Efforts

More and more investment firms are basing recommendations on data. One huge source of data is news. By extracting headlines and article copy and using that data for predictive analysis, investment professionals can gain valuable insights into trends, events, and shifting views that affect the companies and products they are tracking. However, manually gathering news articles is time consuming, especially when global news in many languages is needed. Import.io delivers a solution that can automatically and routinely extract thousands of news articles, feeding your business a continuous source of data and intelligence. The Import.io solution uses machine learning to determine how to extract articles, no matter the language or structure of the news site. Equity research firms use this aggregate news data to feed their own machine learning algorithms and predict investment success. Investment firms can combine this data with top-down research to build winning strategies for their clients. Market information is freely available on the web, but spans across hundreds of websites, such as Angel List, TechCrunch, Crunchbase, corporate websites, and others. Combing through multiple websites and online databases by hand can be difficult to manage and isn’t always reliable. Import.io can parse through the information and even find the latest updated data. This allows equity researchers to quickly pull the relevant information together to evaluate the necessary financials. The web is growing exponentially and changing continuously. To date, trying to access the world’s biggest data source using legacy web scraping tactics leaves you with data that’s incomplete, inaccurate, unreliable, and out of date—all while forcing you to incur high costs and business risk. With Import.io, organizations can leverage a comprehensive Web Data Integration solution that makes it fast, easy, and affordable to maximize the strategic value of web data. This solution enables financial firms to identify, extract, prepare, integrate, and consume web data. This solution delivers the high quality, timely, and extensive intelligence you need to outperform competitors and stay on top of dynamic markets. Data is an essential part of any good sales and marketing initiative—and the more high-quality data available, the better the odds of success. Now more than ever, web data can give sales and marketing teams the extra intelligence they need to do more effective planning and optimize their results. However, the web is growing exponentially and changing continuously. To date, trying to access the world’s biggest data source using legacy web scraping tactics leaves you with data that’s incomplete, inaccurate, unreliable, and out of date—all while forcing you to incur high costs and business risk.

Gary Read, CEO & Chairman