Online reseller Aussie Hi Fi taps Microsoft partner Invigor for retail sales intelligence

ASX-listed data analytics software provider Invigor has helped Aussie Hi Fi take its price checking to the cloud, giving real-time insights to stay ahead of the competition in the competitive online retail market.

Based in Brisbane, Aussie Hi Fi is an online audiovisual specialist retailer that sells speakers, turntables and home theatre equipment.

Invigor works with clients to develop complex algorithms from data sets like products, price and promotions and combines them with its own proprietary data sets to provide deeper insights to help customers make decisions about their own position in the market.

Prior to Invigor stepping in, Aussie Hi Fi was tracking prices of its competitors with inaccurate methods without the deeper insight it needed to stay competitive and improve metrics like market position, volume, sales, revenue and margins.

“Knowing how influential competitive behaviour is on sales, we want them to shift to more automated, intelligent ways of making price or promotional decisions, rather than just reacting to price drops," Invigor marketing director Camila Lima said. "It’s really shifting from repricing to building pricing models using artificial intelligence.”

The software vendor started working with Aussie Hi Fi in June by introducing one of its key products, SpotLite, a tool that monitors online product listings in real-time to analyse merchandising strategies.

“We hadn’t been able to tell if we were the cheapest, or by how much," Aussie Hi Fi ecommerce and marketing manager Casey Jones said. "Preserving profit margin is as important as being competitive.”

The company said the key benefit of SpotLite was being able to remain competitive while ensuring product quality.

Aussie Hi Fi is now able to benefit from Invigor's decision to migrate the SpotLite platform to Microsoft Azure to take advantage of the cloud's analytics and machine learning capabilities. Jones said Aussie Hi now wants to bring insights from SpotLite direct to its customers.

“We’ve already shopped around for them so we are confident that we’ve got the best price. Ideally, we want customers to see real-time price comparisons whether that’s in-store or on the website which frees them up to take into account quality and functionality, which are also important considerations when it comes to value for money.”

Invigor signed a memorandum of understanding with Microsoft in December last year and since then, has moved SpotLite and another of its products called Shopper Insights to Azure, which is a customer segmenting tool. Invigor said it was also working with Microsoft's Azure capabilities to enhance the platform.