COVID-19 has massively accelerated the growth of e-commerce, according to an Adobe report released in June. Total online spending in May hit $82.5 billion, up 77% year-over-year.
As competition in the e-commerce space heats up, there is a need for ways to track and analyze competitor prices and catalogues across multiple platforms to better adjust price and evolve offerings. Developing such a tool that is capable of doing this in a scalable fashion from scratch is both time-consuming and costly. This is where Microsoft’s Power Platform is a game changer when it comes to building scalable automations and interfaces.
The Power Platform consists of 4 no-code services:
1. Power BI: Data visualization and reporting2. Power Apps: Build applications and websites in a simple, fast and scalable way
3. Power Automate: Build automated flows and RPA
4. Power Virtual Agents: Build intelligent chatbots
In this demonstration, we have used Microsoft Power Automate and Power Apps to build a demo application that does the following:
1. Product onboarding: The application allows you to onboard new products along with details related to the different platforms it is on2. Price scraping from different vendors (for demo, we have assumed only vendors on Amazon)
3. Pricing insights
4. Create alert rules based on pricing
5. Take action like changing prices or running a campaign based on insights
Demo
Alert
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How does the app work?
Part 1 – Get data
We use Power Automate to scrape data from e-commerce websites, in this case we are using Amazon for the demo.
The flow will be scheduled to run daily and utilize the Robotic Process Automation (RPA) flow to automatically get data in website. After that, data will be stored in Common Data Service which is a standardized database that allows you to leverage the security and connectivity of Microsoft services.
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Power Automate UI Flow (runs daily)
Part 2 – Developing the application
We use Canvas App in Microsoft Power Platform to build the app. This service helps one to build the app in a short period of time.
Also, we embedded a Power BI report to store insights on pricing analysis, ratings and sentiment between competitors.
Is this something of interest to you? If you have a use case in mind, do get in touch with us for a free 1:1 discovery workshop today!
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