Spotlite

Benefits:

Easy to use and once set up provides good content. If it were able to be expanded and collect the required amount of data sets and also set up so that links dont break it would be brilliant

Drawbacks:

It becomes quite cumbersome to keep on top of web pages that are constantly changing. Also one license is limited in its ability to extract the level of products and customers that are required.

In sum:

Ability to hold teams to account on their pricing where the retailer does not report into our existing data collection sets

Benefits:

Spotlite is in fact an easy-to-use solution and the customer support team was also extremely efficient and reactive to our needs, which is exactly what we want in a technology partner.

Drawbacks:

The trial period was short. Testing is a very important activity whether it is software testing or testing of any other product.

Benefits:

The dashboard is reliable, helpful and impressive with valuable trackability outputs that helps improve the channel sales management but also the pricing strategy.

Drawbacks:

Monitoring minor players is the area for improvement. There are a few other e-tailers in the region which the sofware could not monitor. Perhaps an indepth dialogue with the client may help the developer to look into these small guys.

In sum:

It helped improve the channel management.

Benefits:

Easy to deploy, automated alerts and reports, data freshness (updated hourly), valuable time saver for the marketing team, granular competitor data helps build an efficient strategy per category.

Drawbacks:

API would really help us visualise the data within our own reporting tools (team said it will be available in Q2, I'm glad it's coming!)

In sum:

Easy set up, detailed competitor tracking, good automated reports are a time saver for marketing teams.

Benefits:

easy to use. Once set up, not many things i need to care. i can compare all other competitors price very easily.

Drawbacks:

Only one email i can save for reporting. I wanted to share reports with others but i have to send to my email and then share manually.

Benefits:

Easy process to setup and track competitors movements, the configuration itself is very intuitive and support when necessary is very efficient.

Drawbacks:

You cannot configure by products group, which will make even easier track product lines. Some requests in terms of updates take too long to be applied.

Benefits:

SpotLite has great visibility in promotion and pricing tracking. I use it with different clients.This used to be a manual process and now I get a centralised view with updates every hour. Promotion tracking is perfect to tap into competitors promo calendars and the frequent updates help us react quickly to competitor price changes and tactics.

Drawbacks:

My only request for future iterations would be to have APIs available to integrate it with our own internal systems.

Benefits:

Easy software to handle with, also setup configuration is quite intuitive making possible track all competitors moves.

Drawbacks:

Few personalizing possiblitys, long time to have information update and you only track princing range.

Benefits:

Saves hours in monitoring competitors using google or visiting their sites everyday, Easy to use and even easier to communicate with! Spotlite's Customer service truly is 10 out of 10!

Drawbacks:

one it few flaws is that it has to be programmed sku by sku, site by site. It is unable to simply find a product by sku/upc listed within a site or google.

Benefits:

Spotlite is easy to setup. The reporting is easy to use, with the option to export data allowing us to visualise the information in different ways. There are more comprehensive solutions out there, but they typically require a lot more effort (consulting) to get up and running. If you want to start getting back pricing data quickly, this is a good product

Drawbacks:

There is no API available yet. An API would allows us to pull the data into our own reporting systems automatically (rather than rely on downloading CSV's, and uploading them to our own systems. I understand an API is on the way.

In sum:

Pricing data across a number of products and websites. This saves us 20-30 hours a month of work, and gives us a better resolution of data than we were willing to collect manually (4 times daily updates versus manual once a day checks). The information will help us better understand pricing across different channels.