How can I collect data from the retailer portals?
If you are happy with infrequent high-grain data (e.g. Week x Item) then you can simply download an appropriate report from one or more retailer portal(s) every time you need it.
Running weekly reports is relatively quick and easy, although retailer portals are notoriously busy on Monday mornings and best avoided if you value your time! Many account managers will leave their weekly analysis until Monday afternoon or evening, when downloading last week’s sales report from each retailer is a little less stressful.
If you want to collect low-grain data – especially if you want to collect multiple metrics, at different levels of grain, on a daily basis – then you will probably want to automate report generation. Some of the retailer portals allow you to schedule reports that you can receive by email, others will require you to use some form of ‘software robot’ to login, run reports and download the resulting data files.
Learn about how we automate this process for our customers here.
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