Goedecker’s Achieves More Complete Product Information With Data Enrichment
Founded in St. Louis, Missouri in 1951 by Ben Goedeker, Goedeker’s is a multichannel retailer of furniture, household plumbing supplies, appliances, and other home goods. In their hometown market of St. Louis, they remain a household name when people talk about appliances, electronics, and furniture, but people also know them from their advertising message that always contains the line: “Give us a chance, any day but Sunday.”
Challenges
With so much competition throughout the industry, Jeff Minor, CIO & CTO at Goedeker’s, knew that differentiation would come through offering a better user experience by providing consumers with more information about their products than the competition. With 40,000 SKUs from various manufacturers across several industries, gathering and inputting the necessary amounts of data was rather laborious and difficult.
As Minor recalled, “We tried manually gathering and entering the data, we tried scraping programs, and we even tried offshore third-party companies. Before Wiser, our best approach was scraping data with a crawler and then manually entering the data. We had five full-time people and combined, they only averaged about 200 products a day at their peak.”
Minor determined that in order to get ahead of the competition, he needed to gather more complete product information and at a much quicker rate, without taking on added expenses through new hires or reducing the SKU count.
Solutions
Due to the inefficiencies and tediousness of manually inputting and updating tens of thousands of SKUs, Minor set out to find guidance on a better approach.
“I wanted another way,” he explained. “I knew there had to be a better method, so I did my research and laid out all of my options and did my due diligence, but still wasn’t sure which option was the best for our needs.”
After leaning towards another offshore third party, Minor decided that Wiser was just too promising to pass up.
In order to find out what exactly Wiser was capable of, Goedeker’s started with a small segment of their data, giving the Wiser team their appliances dataset and let the technology do the rest. After just six weeks, Goedeker’s had touched 8,000 SKUs through the entering of new or updated information and in some cases, completely new product information.
“I don’t know how else to say it, other than, I was blown away with the quantity and quality of the data that Wiser returned,” Minor added.
What separates Wiser from crawling aggregators is a proprietary technology which automates the way that humans do research and become experts. Gathering content from a source is just one step. Making sense of a product across multiple sources is the biggest hurdle that Wiser solves. The result is very detailed, usable content with control over where each value originates. Vetted content is at the fingertips of the content team.
PRODUCTS USED:
We used to have five people working full-time gathering and inputting data, at a rate of about 200 SKUs a day, but with Wiser, we’ve been able to gather content on roughly 20,000 SKUs in three weeks while cutting our staff down to one person.
Jeff Minor
CIO & CTO
20K SKUs
Enriched In 3 Weeks
5 to 1
Smaller Team Working On Full-Time Data Enrichement
Results
Since signing their contract and turning the technology loose in two months later, Minor and his team have seen their production go through the roof.
“We used to have five people working full-time gathering and inputting data, at a rate of about 200 SKUs a day, but with Wiser, we’ve been able to gather content on roughly 20,000 SKUs in three weeks while cutting our staff down to one person,” Minor noted.
Now that Goedeker’s has streamlined the way they gather and import product information for their existing inventory, Minor and his team can take another step toward getting a leg up on their competitors. Right now, they offer around 40,000 SKUs due to their resource limitations. With Wiser, they now can rapidly onboard products, which expands their catalog and SKU count.
“Our suppliers and the manufacturers that we order from have always had a much more complete and extensive product line, but due to ceilings on our end, we’ve been limited in what we can offer,” concluded Minor. “Now that we’ve seen what Wiser can accomplish, we would love to double our product line in the next 12 to 18 months.”
Goedeker’s determined that in order to be No. 1, they needed to offer unparalleled product information on their existing products, but also expand their catalog without jeopardizing the quality. After trying other solutions, including manually gathering data, third-party crawling technologies, and offshore solutions, they settled on Wiser and couldn’t be happier with the decision.
Gain a Partner in Wiser
Wiser Solutions is in it for the long haul. We will be a dedicated partner to your marketing efforts as we work with you to establish baselines, run tests, optimize workflows, and turn our real-time data into confident marketing decisions for your business.
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.
What Problems Are You Facing
We’re here to understand your challenges and craft a solution that fits your needs.
