Omnia University (PriceWatch Module)

The content of this University should help you to kick-start your journey with Omnia if Omnia is new to you and/or your organization. But if you already know Omnia, University will help you learn about the different capabilities of the Omnia system, reassess your strategy, and get new insights into the tool.

Why are we here in the first place?

Omnia’s purpose is to “unleash superpowers by democratizing expertise and automation.” That probably sounds awesome but let us explain what we mean by that.

E-commerce and omnichannel have fundamentally disrupted retail. With e-commerce, assortments can, in principle, be unlimited in size. With increased assortment size, the number of pricing and online marketing decisions you need to make has also exploded. In the pre-internet era, the average retailer had to make about four thousand pricing and marketing decisions throughout a quarter to stay competitive. Now, however, things are different. Today, the average retailer needs to make 60 million pricing and marketing decisions multiple times per day.

Add to that the fact that the number of competitors offering the same product has severely increased, and the landscape can change overnight. This is a completely different level of complexity, and for your business to cope with the revolutionary world of e-commerce, you need automation and data insights. This is why you’ve invested in Omnia. Omnia automatically gathers all competitors’ price points on the full assortment, and it can refresh that data multiple times per day. Through our portal you can automate your pricing strategies on any part of your assortment, making it easy to test different pricing strategies. In just a few clicks you can test, come up with new ideas based on the results, and adjust the strategies accordingly. Instead of doing boring manual work you can enter a creative learning loop of testing pricing strategies at scale. This is the “democratizing” part of our mission: we make the technology that big giants such as Amazon and Alibaba have developed internally available to everyone.

 

It is deliberately not our mission to automate away people’s jobs, but it is our mission to Reinvent Retail by unleashing your superpowers and making your job more attractive. This does however require a somewhat different skillset, and you need to be more data-driven and comfortable in using this powerful technology. Therefore, we do not only deliver our platform, but really help you with expertise and training. We do this personally with our Customer Success team and consulting partners. And we help you digitally through the Omnia Blog, Knowledge Base and this University.

The University is a step-by-step guide that is built up in different courses:

• In ‘Getting Started’ you will look at your commercial strategy, competitors and assortment. You will think about your goals with Omnia and get an overview how Omnia works
• In ‘How to Deliver Data to Omnia’ you’ll find the data requirements for Omnia
• In ‘Connecting Data’ you will learn how to add, link and map data feeds
• In ‘Competitor Data’ you will find the different data sources Omnia has and how you can get insights from the competitor data
• In ‘Dynamic Pricing’ you will learn how to translate your strategies into actions and rules in Omnia, how to build safety nets, and how to test your strategy
• In ‘Reports’ you will learn how to set up reports and exports in Omnia

We hope you enjoy the following courses. And as always, if you have any questions, don’t hesitate to reach out.

How to deliver data to Omnia

Preparing data

To import data into Omnia, you need to connect a product feed. This feed must contain a set of properties to be used in pricing decisions (for example an article number, EAN, purchase price, or selling price). What properties you exactly need to provide depends on:

• What modules you are using
• The variables you want to take into account in your pricing strategy

The article required data overview in our Knowledge Base provides an overview of the required and recommended properties per module.

Your data can be imported either via CSV, XML, or JSON file and can be connected in three ways:

1. From an (S)FTP server. A file is generated based on the data of your systems and is placed on an FTP or SFTP server. Omnia pulls the file from the server, with the location URL, and imports the data accordingly. The server can be protected with a username and, in case of an SFTP, with an SFTP key
2. Get data from an HTTP(S) location. Similar to the (S)FTP, Omnia can import the data via a HTTP(S) location.
3. Through API import endpoint connection.

Additional data sources

Not all data needs to be connected via one feed. It is possible to connect multiple feeds to Omnia. This can come in handy in case you have data coming from multiple sources (e.g. stock info from your ERP versus product data from your PIM). To enable linking of feeds both feeds need to have at least one common denominator. This article describes how to link multiple feeds.

How Omnia gathers competitive price points

During the second part of our pricing run, Omnia gathers the competitor price points. To gather these price points, Omnia requires specific product attributes, depending on what data source you use. For Comparison Shopping Engines (CSEs), you must supply us with an EAN/GTIN. These codes are unique for each product and used across the entire landscape. Therefore, this is the most accurate way to match products on.

In some retail verticals EANs/GTINs are not used, for example within car replacement parts. We can scrape pricing information for products without EAN/GTIN via our Direct Scraping data. For Direct Scraping, it is best to provide as many data points per product as possible. This helps to ensure the matching is done correctly.

You can find all our available data sources on this page.

In which format can your data be imported?

a. CSV

b. XML

c. JSON

d. All of the above

How can Omnia collect your product feed?

a. From an (s)ftp server

b. From an HTTP(S) location

c. From (s)ftp and HTTP(s) location

d.From (s)ftp, HTTP(s) location and API connection

With what property do we mostly match your articles

a. EAN

b. SKU-code

c. Product name

d. All 3 above

Why do we use EAN numbers to match?

a. Nobody else does it

b. It is a unique identifier

c. Omnia can only process numbers

d. Omnia doesn’t use EAN to match

Connecting data

Adding your products and their attributes

Importing your data into Omnia consists of four steps:

1. Select a portal and go to Product Import tab
2. Connect and configure your feed(s) in the portal
3. Map your properties to the Omnia import fields
4. Set up filters (optional)

Please note that the above are applicable for import through (s)ftp and HTTP(s) while API connection is done differently.

1. Select a portal

After a shop is set up, you will see several details regarding the shop in the overview:

• Records: the number of imported articles
• Last update: timestamp last import
• Status: status of last import
• More Info: explanation for warning or error import

You can manually run an import by clicking the Import Feeds button.

2. Connect & configure your feed(s)

The first step is adding the feed(s) to Omnia. By navigating to “Configure feeds” you can add the feeds required. Adding a feed is a relatively easy process, but depending on whether you use (S)FTP or HTTP(S) you need specific details. You can read more about adding feeds here.

As discussed in the previous lesson, you might need to add multiple feeds. As long as they have a common denominator, Omnia is able to link these together. This article explains more about that process.

3. Mapping the data points into Omnia

After adding the different data feeds, you now need to tell Omnia what these data points are and how it should read them. We call this process the “Import Mapping”. There are a large number of fields already present in Omnia, but you can also add new data points in case your strategy requires that, as explained on this page.

There are five different types of field values:

• Text (String) - Select this field type for all fields that contain text or numbers that are not to be calculated on (e.g. EAN).
• Number (Int64) - This field type should be selected for all fields that contain numbers without any decimals (integers).
• Number (Decimal) - This field type is applicable for all fields that contain numbers with decimals.
• Boolean - A boolean is a value type that can only have two representations: 1 or 0 (i.e. True or False).

When selecting fields from your feeds in the mapping section, you have to select the field type. Besides the above-mentioned field types, there are some other options:

• Price (decimal separator comma/dot) - Select this field type for fields that contain prices including currency symbol.
• Number (decimal separator comma/dot) - Select this field type for fields that contain numbers without currency symbols.

Read here for more information about different value types of field.

It can happen that the data in your feed is not 100% in the correct format and requires mutation. You can use Excel-like formulas to mutate data directly in Omnia.

4. Set up filters

It sometimes is desirable to add filters to the import. This helps to keep your portal clean (i.e. private label products are not matchable) or to prevent imports with missing data points (e.g. missing purchase price information). Some examples of filters that you could use is:

• Exclude articles without EAN and SKU. For Omnia to import a product, it requires at least the EAN or SKU field to have a value. If it misses either of these, a warning will be shown in the import section.
• Excluding articles without a purchase price. This filter is only relevant if you are using our Dynamic Pricing module. To ensure no price advices are below your minimum price, you can configure a filter that excludes products that have no purchase price available.

Read here how you can set up a filter.

5. Ready for Import

After finishing the import mapping & setting up a filter, it is important you check if the data is imported into the system successfully. You can do this by running the import job and check the status of it once it is done. 

There will be a status indicator to see if the import was a success.

• If Omnia is able to reach your feed and import the data, the status will be "Success"
• Status “Warning” means that Omnia was able to reach your feed, but something requires some attention. By clicking "More info" the import log expands and tells you what needs attention.
• An “Error” is shown when Omnia is not able to import any data. You can set up an email alert for import errors. 

Once you have your portal set up, you can see

a. All my Facebook friends

b. A forecast of my sales

c. Number of imported articles

d. None of the above

Which statement regarding importing data is FALSE?

a. You can add multiple properties into one (mapping) field

b. You cannot transform fields in the right format

c. Omnia has various value type of fields

d. You can use formulas in mapping

Value type Number (Int64) is a

a. Field that contain numbers with decimals

b. Field that contain numbers without any decimals

c. Field that can only have two representations: 1 or 0

Looking into competitor data

Omnia has different dashboards that allow its users to dive deep into the data, filter, slice and download them if needed.

1. The Shop Overview

The Shop Overview Dashboard in Omnia Retail provides a high-level summary of your product data, including the total number of products, match rate, total offers found, and number of competing shops. It features visual tools to compare your prices against competitors and analyze overlap in product assortments, highlighting where your prices are lower, equal to, or higher. You can filter data by source (e.g., Google Shopping or Amazon), drill into specific competitors for detailed insights, and export all visualizations as PDFs or CSVs for reporting. 

To drill more on a specific competitor that you would like to analyse, clicking the name of the competitor will bring you to the shop details page, which looks like below:

2. Product Overview shows a comprehensive analysis of the matched products—those with available market data. It presents key metrics such as the number of matched products, total offers found, average offers per product, and the average price ratio, which compares your selling prices to the market average (excluding shipping costs). A price ratio graph visually illustrates how your prices align with market averages, indicating whether your pricing is above or below competitors. Additionally, the dashboard includes a "Cheapest Selling Price Last 30 Days" section to help ensure compliance with the Omnibus Directive. At the bottom, a detailed product list displays each matched product's current price, the lowest market price (including the seller), and the number of offers found. 

For deeper insights on product level, you can navigate to a product's detailed page by clicking the three dots next to its ID.

You may get questioned, or even wonder why a certain product is selling especially well or poorly at a specific time, and often it can come as a result of a change in the market. A main competitor might go out of stock with a product, leading to more sales coming your way.

On the other hand, a competitor might have heavily discounted a certain product. This could lead to a cascade of others in the market following suit, leaving you with a large price distance.

Thankfully, this product's detailed page will help you get closer to your answers. 

Value of using Pricewatch export data

While Omnia’s platform offers users the ability to analyze product-level prices and market changes over time, it is also valuable to use Pricewatch daily data to feed into your internal business intelligence tool and data warehouse. When you feed this data into these tools, you can build a larger directional analysis for your company and become owner of this data.

We like to think of our dashboards as the speedboat and Pricewatch exports as the container vessel. The speedboat can be driven by anyone and allows agility and flexibility in gaining transparency in the market. On the other hand, the container vessel is steered directionally by large amounts of data coming in on a daily basis.

Maybe you are a brand interested in seeing how retailers discount new seasonal products over time across various markets. Or maybe you are a retailer interested in how responsive certain competitors are to your new pricing strategy. These are the type of insights you can gather from setting up Pricewatch exports with a few simple settings.

Pricewatch exports are raw line items of the offers from your selected data sources

You can adjust the data you receive in these Pricewatch exports by toggling any combination of the data points in the export on or off.

The report itself will be a .csv file with each line being a specific offer from a specified competitor shop. By seeing what data points will be included in this report, you can then start to determine what other internal data you could merge with Pricewatch data.

Define what insights you want to achieve

Daily Pricewatch exports will provide complete transparency into the prices of your selected competitors daily or multiple times per day. If you can expand the ways you use this data to make decisions, the data will be even more valuable.

To start, ask yourself what you want to learn from specific competitors, products, categories, markets, or internal business processes. Below are some inspirational questions an Omnia customer might want to answer with the help of their Pricewatch data. This list is not exhaustive, but should give some idea on what value drivers are possible.

Pricing Strategy Insights:

• How do prices differ across markets per product/category?
• How often are prices changed, and does that differ between markets?
• What is the pricing variance in the market per product category?
• What are my competitors’ general pricing strategy? (This will become easier to decipher over time)
• What is the GTM pricing trend for new season products?
• Which competitors or retailers discount from RRP?
• Are there large enough variances between markets or in a specific market that requires adjusting our pricing strategy?

Buying department

• How much of your assortment has prices on the market lower than the price you paid for?
• How quickly do seasonal products become discounted by competitors?
• How high are the discounts from RRP from other competitors?
• Which competitor leads the discounting in the market?
• Which products/categories retain a higher price over time vs which products have more drastic discounts hurting margin?

Marketing:

• Which products are you outpriced by X% and would be better off not advertising?
• What larger pricing trends can marketing get ahead of rather than reacting to their marketing metrics in hindsight?

Miscellaneous:

• Can we merge product attributes from internal data with market prices to determine trends in buying habits?
• Can we merge this with website product filtering (popularity, etc) to exclude products where we are not competitively priced?
• How much impact did market pricing trends have on delivered margin?
• How much does our NPS score correlate with market competitiveness?

Set up your Pricewatch Export

See how to export and configure Pricewatch exports here. We recommend having an FTP/SFTP location to place your daily exports. If you do not have a server to export to and would like to use Omnia’s hosted server, reach out to your Customer Success Manager for details and pricing.

You have now completed the part on competitor data. Let’s see if you are able to pass the quiz before diving into Dynamic Pricing.

Competitor data quiz

The average price ratio is

a. Your average price compared to one selected competitor

b. Your average price compared to a group of competitors

c. The average of your current price versus last week

d. Your selling price and the average market price (excluding shipping cost)

What does it mean to have a positive average price ratio?

a. You are priced above the market average

b. Your margin is good

c. You are priced below the market average

What does the average position in price ratio mean?

a. The number of competitors that are more expensive than you

b. The number of competitors that are cheaper than you

c. The number of products you sell at the lowest market price

d. The number of products you sell at the highest market price

The table data in the product overview can be

a. Filtered

b. Downloaded

c. Both

Omnia PriceWatch data

a. Only lives in Omnia and can’t be exported

b. Can only be exported to Omnia’s hosted server

c. Can be exported daily with selected columns

d. Can be exported to your own FTP/SFTP location with fixed columns

PriceWatch exports can be used for

a. Pricing strategy insights

b. Sharing insights with your buying department

c. Sharing insights with marketing

d. All of the above