Tyre Industry research specialists, Encircle Marketing, has been “scrapping” tyre prices across online marketplace for over 8 years.
During this time, its approach has had to adapt considerably in order to increase the frequency and depth of data and more significantly, of late, to keep up with the demands of its Client base.
We recently caught up with founding partners, Jason Cunningham and David Myers, to understand the impact on their business and their plans for the future.
Jason started “A line we appear using more and more frequently of late is the shear amount of data we are now capturing on a daily basis. It took us to Year 6 of our existence, for example, to capture our 1 millionth price. Today however, we are capturing over 2.5 million prices a day!”
In 2009 when Encircle started to collate tyre prices online, they had a Team of 4 Analysts whose sole responsibility was to search for prices online. Today, they scrape over 120 sites across 18 European markets covering B2B, B2C, PCR, 4×4, LTR and TBR and 2,300 + unique sizes. David commented “It is almost laughable to think how we did things then and what we do now. Back in 2009, we were very much of the opinion that having a physical online surf was the purest and correct way to do things and in many ways, this is still correct, given the huge variance in how retailers list the same product on their websites. That said, market demand wouldn’t allow/ give us the 2 weeks, at least, that is required to put the data together!”.
Since the start of 2018, Encircle has secured 4 additional Clients onto it’s Internet Pricing Subscription. This has come from both within the Tyre Industry and outside with both VMA and Car Hire companies interested in monitoring prices.
Jason added “Is it important for our business to demonstrate, is that we are a complete tyre pricing service. In other words, we’re not simply a data warehouse that can churn out reports but also a value-added business partner that can work with our Clients to produce the analytical tools required to then bring the data to life and garner change/ increase margins/ increase profitability”.
To that end, Encircle is very busy building bespoke pricing tools for a number of Clients that allow the data to speak directly with internal pricing systems and suggest RRP prices based upon individual platform strategies.
In addition, providing Price Alerts/ notifications to mobile/ desktop/ tablets that can alert a User of any changes to prices when compared to a User’s own price list/ key billing or European price list.
David closed “Our approach since Day 1 has been to provide every Client with the tools they require to track tyre prices. We will continue to do this and endeavour to be the choice for tyre industry pricing research both here in the UK and across Europe”.
