How Crescent Electric Supply Company Enhanced eCommerce Presence Through Data Enrichment
Mike Mayer, eCommerce Director at Crescent Electric Supply Company, and his team faced a big challenge. Crescent Electric represents more than 600 vendors, carries over 500,000 different products, and serves 27 states through 120 distribution facilities.
Mayer’s challenge was to enhance Crescent Electric’s eCommerce presence through a more complete product offering and to broaden the companies reach beyond the 27 states with a physical distribution location. The vision for the website was to make it into a superstore which represented inventory from all 120 locations.
The website was home to only a fraction of the products and it was the equivalent of one store location with approximately 3,800 SKUs. Additionally, there were huge gaps in data and much of the information that was available was incomplete and/or outdated. There was also a lack of visibility to the competitive landscape, particularly related to pricing. This made the prospect of ensuring their products were competitively priced an overwhelming and tedious task.
Challenges
Mayer’s challenge was to find a way to:
- Consolidate and cleanse information from a variety of sources.
- Reduce costs and increase productivity related to the activities associated with product research beyond gathering the data and to simplify the process of compiling and cleansing the data.
- Enhance existing product content with information and assets that were not part of the current online catalog data set.
- Ensure that the information on the website is accurate and Complete. Add new products to the online catalog efficiently and cost-effectively.
- Gain visibility to the competitive pricing landscape to enable the execution of a pricing strategy.
Solutions
After estimating that it would take two years to manually gather, compile, cleanse, and upload product data for hundreds of thousands of products, Mayer knew he had to find a better way. He evaluated options that included continued use of a data aggregator and other methods of automating the collection of data, but they all fell short.
He continued to search for a way to automate the process and was pleased when he was introduced to Wiser. It turned out to be the only software he found that met all his needs and would enable his team to onboard thousands of products and enhanced product information to the website in a fraction of the time it would take to do manually.
Wiser’s capabilities equipped his team to create recipes (descriptions of the content they wanted) specific to Crescent Electric’s goals and objectives and greatly improved the process of gathering, standardizing, classifying, and de-duping data. What separates Wiser from crawling aggregators is a proprietary technology that automates the way humans do research and become experts. Wiser not only gathers the data, but it also blends the records from multiple sources in a way that makes sense. The result is very detailed, usable content with control over where each value originates.
PRODUCTS USED:
The Wiser team was great to work with. They provided answers to our questions and addressed any issues that came up.
Mike Mayer
eCommerce Director
600
Vendors Across 27 States
3.8K to 46K
SKUs in less than 2 months
Results
The Crescent Electric team jumped in with both feet and took a very aggressive approach to implement the use of Wiser to achieve their objectives.
After two days of training and over two weeks of work, the dedicated team generated over 100 recipes that enabled them to increase the number of SKUs from 3,800 to 46,000 in less than two months. The teams from Crescent Electric and Wiser worked together closely throughout the project.
In addition to significantly increasing the number of SKUs by incorporating Wiser into their process, they were also able to add content such as detailed product specifications, instructions, and attributes that were not previously available for their customers. Mayer and his team have also gained visibility to the competitive landscape and now have the information they need to achieve business goals of growth and profitability.
Gain a Partner in Wiser
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Knock that next merchandising campaign out of the park. Win market share from your competition with price optimization. Understand shopper insights to create better messaging. No matter your goals, Wiser is here to help.
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