Managing over 3 million products with Epinote data enrichment.

The challenge

Shopee needed to support their market share expansion with a data-driven approach to managing prices. With a growing portfolio of products and merchants joining their platform, they wanted to ensure:

• market-winning prices in all categories
• access to actionable pricing data for merchants

Despite using numerous web scrapers and data vendors their team realized that a fully automated approach led to missing subtle differences between products. By leveraging the same types of data as everyone else they could not achieve competitive advantage.

The solution

The solution was to add human oversight into the database creation. This allowed to get ahead of the competitors who gathered industrious amounts of data but sacrificed quality and made pricing decisions based on imperfect datasets.

Together with Epinote, Shopee implemented a solution in which every SKU was labeled and price-compared against other retailers using human intelligence. The analysis allowed distinguishing products that were:

• identical in all aspects
• identical in specification but sold in different quantities
• identical in specification and quantities, but different in minor aspects (e.g. color versions)

Those tiny details proved crucial in determining the best possible retail price of consumer goods across numerous categories.

Given the sheer volume of datasets, Epinote put together a dedicated team consisting of project managers, analysts, QA analysts and shift managers. Next, we staffed the project to operate 24/7 and rotated the analysts to maintain accuracy SLA set by the client.

Finally, over 300 associates were deployed to work on datasets as we managed to increase daily output from 4000 to 10 000 analyzed records per day.

The outcome

Armed with superior product data Shopee managed to scale both ends of their marketplace. They offered the most attractive prices to their customers while providing added value for merchants who could access market insights unavailable to competitors. All made possible by deploying our flexible workforce built to deliver even the most demanding projects.