SHORTEN PRODUCT ONBOARDING TIME FOR THE ONLINE SHOP

Conrad Electronic has ambitious plans for the online marketplace. By the end of 2020, around 10 million products should be available to offer buyers a wide range of products. This means significant growth compared to the current range. In addition, the retail section is also to be clearly expanded. Maintaining the quality of the data with this high volume of new product information while reducing the manual effort is a major challenge.

The abundance of product data, which is sent to the physical articles in various formats by the suppliers, had to be transferred to the systems quickly and efficiently. It is important that as much of the relevant product information as possible can be transferred from the supplier and that the articles can be correctly assigned to the Conrad navigation structure in order to provide the customer with an optimal shopping experience and at the same time achieve an improved conversion rate. Consistent filters have a high relevance so that all products can be found and purchased efficiently during the search process.

To overcome all these hurdles, Conrad Electronic relies on the expertise of Onedot.

HOW ONEDOT HELPED

The manufacturers' unstructured and differently structured catalogues were loaded into the Onedot platform and read into the software for onboarding. The most common catalogue formats consist of different versions of BMEcat, Excel or CSV. For new manufacturers, the entire catalogues were prepared; for manufacturers already in the product range, a product comparison with the existing data ensured that only the new products were prepared.

Subsequently Onedot could be used to assign the new products to the categories of Conrad Electronic. By displaying a confidence level, the user could see how secure the software was in the respective assignment, in order to be able to check and override suggestions in a focused manner.

In the attribute mapping step the attributes of the manufacturers were assigned to the attributes of Conrad. Analogous to the categorization step, the user can view the proposed mappings and override or add to them if necessary.

Within the scope of normalization, the attribute values were assigned to Conrad's value lists and the values for the filter attributes were standardized. In a report, mapped values can be viewed, checked for completeness and supplemented if necessary.

During the entire supplier onboarding Conrad Electronic had the possibility to monitor the status via the Onedot web application and to give feedback on the individual steps. This also ensures the traceability of the results.

At the end of the onboarding process, Conrad Electronic was provided with a file containing the prepared catalogue for each manufacturer, which could then be imported directly into the PIM.

Via an SFTP interface, Onedot was provided with an up-to-date copy of the PIM product data, so that the machine learning model could always be calculated based on the latest data. In addition, the current product data model with structure, attributes and value lists is constantly provided so that Onedot could process to the current structure of Conrad Electronic.

THE RESULT

The raw product catalogue from the manufacturer was prepared in such a way that the catalogue could be directly imported into the Conrad Electronic system. More than 550'000 SKU's have already been successfully created in the system, precisely assigned to the approximately 5'000 Conrad categories and mapped against the almost 12'000 Conrad attributes.

After a few feedback iterations and the expansion of the training data, an accuracy and hit rate of over 90% was achieved in the categorization and attribute mapping.

The ambitious schedule of Conrad Electronic regarding the expansion of the products could be kept and the employees were relieved during the onboarding process. In addition, tedious, repetitive data maintenance steps in the data team were significantly reduced.

By using Onedot, Conrad Electronic will be able to concentrate on the expansion of the marketplace, deepen supplier relationships and focus on the composition of relevant product ranges for customers. This strengthens the market position of Conrad Electronic in the highly competitive online market.