FAQ
About Upstream Commerce
What is Upstream Commerce?
Upstream Commerce provides retailers with pricing and assortment intelligence that is real-time, accessible 24/7, affordable, and intuitively presented as never before. Upstream Commerce delivers information comparing your product offering with your competitors’ offerings. Data includes pricing, product assortment, availability, updates on promotions and sales, catalog changes, insights on pricing and assortment opportunities, and more. The service is cloud-based, does not require setup or integration, and is easy to start using.
What makes Upstream Commerce special?
Upstream Commerce was founded by seasoned retail technology experts with decades of experience and uses the most advanced artificial intelligence, semantic analysis, data-mining, and image-recognition algorithms to provide retailers with the most comprehensive, feature rich retail intelligence solution on the market.
What’s the difference between using Upstream Commerce to monitor competitors’ prices and manually monitoring the prices with Comparison Shopping Engines?
Comparison shopping engines (CSEs) do not include all products or competitors. When you use CSEs to monitor competitors’ prices, you get only partial product coverage, whereas Upstream Commerce is designed to address the needs of retail sites, and allows tracking large numbers of products: hundreds, thousands, and more. Furthermore, prices on CSE sites do not always reflect prices on merchant site, for reasons such as MAP considerations. Upstream Commerce presents you with accurate prices from every competitor you want to track and for every product in your catalog.
Who can use Upstream Commerce?
Who is Upstream Commerce for?
The Upstream Commerce Retail Intelligence Suite is most commonly used by pricing, merchandising, and e-commerce managers. Buyers, product marketing managers, and product specialists also find the tool extremely useful, as do business owners and other executives
Can I set up and start using Upstream Commerce all by myself, without IT help?
Yes, you can. No technical skills are required. Upstream Commerce gets everything ready for you. You do not have to integrate the Upstream Commerce solution with your systems, either.
About the service
What type of information does Upstream Commerce provide?
Upstream Commerce provides you with accurate product price and assortment information as well as availability data and many other types of product data—manufacturer, brand, manufacturer part number, full category path, product page URL, and more. Also, you get updates on sales, clearance products and promotions, and products that have been added to competitors’ sites or removed from them.
How many sites can I track with Upstream Commerce?
Upstream Commerce can track any number of sites for you.
How many products can I track with Upstream Commerce?
Upstream Commerce can track any number of products, be it in the hundreds, thousands, or even hundreds of thousands.
How often is the data updated?
Data is typically updated on a daily but can be updated even more than once a day, depending on your needs.
What if I want to track and obtain comparative data for products that are not exactly the same as mine?
You can use Upstream Commerce’s automated product-matching technology to define the products that you want to track. Alternatively, you can use Upstream Commerce’s intuitive interface for manually matching products across sites. This allows comparison of products even if not identical.
What if I want to track products that are not in my Web site’s catalog?
Upstream Commerce can deliver information on all products found at competitors’ sites, including products that are not in your catalog.
How does Upstream Commerce know about product changes on my site?
Upstream Commerce scans your site regularly to identify product changes that you have made. There’s no need to give us information about price changes or products that you’ve added or removed.
Getting started
How do I get started?
Click on the 'Contact Us' link and fill out the form and a member of our team will get right back to you or call 1-800-815-1842.
After I sign up, how long does it take before I can start using the service?
Up to 3 weeks. During this period we begin collecting data and tune our proprietary algorithms to ensure the best results possible.
Do I need the help of my IT staff?
Not at all. Just sign-up, and then sign-in and start working.
Do I need training to get started?
There is typically very little training needed to get started, however, all our customer are eligible for initial training when needed
Privacy and security
Is my product information safe?
Upstream Commerce is committed to the privacy, confidentiality, and security of our customers. We employ advanced security measures to protect your data. Accounts are compartmentalized so that private data cannot be shared.
