e.fundamentals is a digital shelf analytics platform that helps Consumer Packaged Goods (CPG) companies understand how they can sell more products online. Our customers include Pepsi, Mars, Kellogs, Starbucks, Hewlett Packard, and Royal-Canin. We’ve moved from being a start-up to a ‘scale-up’ (now with around 75 employees).
We gather publicly available online data of around 1.5 million products every day, from hundreds of retailers. We then run the online data through some clever analytics pipelines and draw insights. Our SaaS service then presents these insights to our customers. Our entire business is based on gathering publicly available data from websites and developing clever insights developed on what we find. If we don’t get this online data, we can’t generate insights, and we obviously won’t have any customers.
From a business sense, 2020 has been wonderful for us. All the CPGs have understood that the only way they can grow their business is to increase their online sales – so it’s critical that they find the right product at the right time.
What we look for in a data collection provider is its capability to collect data at scale and is reliable – we have to make sure we’re collecting 99% of the products we need every single day. We also wanted a solution that was good value for money and offers a variety of solutions and products. Customer service and support are also very important. We have used other providers in the past and their platforms are very much ‘out of the box’ – they don’t have the self-management aspect, so you need to ask them to rotate the IPs when necessary, which is really inconvenient. The self-management aspect of Bright Data’s platform is great, and the customer service is absolutely outstanding. If ever we have any issues, they are fixed ASAP.
We use the Bright Data Residential IPs as well as the Bright Data Web Unlocker, and our experience with Bright Data has been positive. The platform is more efficient than the ones we have used in the past.
We are planning on doubling in size this year (we tripled last year), and we expect to continue expanding with Bright Data.