Doubling sales with ShopSPY: How Shop4All optimizes its online stores

Hero Shop4All Case Study

Online marketplaces like eBay and Amazon offer a lot of popularity and reach and are the cornerstones of many companies’ e-commerce strategy. When it comes to customization, however, the platforms leave a lot to be desired, which is why more and more companies are opting for a multichannel strategy and operating their own online store alongside their marketplace presence – including our customer Shop4All. For the e-commerce all-rounder, its online stores have a special significance. One of them is ABC Dental Care. CEO Danny Weidner explains to us in an interview why this is so and how ShopSPY has helped to double the retailer’s sales.

Mr. Weidner, nice of you to make yourself available for our interview. To get started, tell our readers a little about yourself and Shop4All!

With pleasure. We, Shop4All GmbH, sell – as the name suggests – products in any direction, but are particularly specialized in articles for oral hygiene. This is mainly due to our history. We sell our articles in Germany and Austria on Amazon, eBay and many other channels. In addition, we also operate our own online stores.

Screenshot ABC Dental Care

In addition to various marketplace presences, Shop4All operates a number of online stores, including ABC Dental Care, an online store for oral hygiene.

Since you bring it up, what is the importance of online stores to your business?

Our own stores are of the utmost importance to us because we have the greatest independence here and do not have to play by the rules of the marketplace operators. The more individuality, the better.

Reading Tip: Success with your own online store – how to succeed with a multichannel strategy

How did you optimize your prices before SnapTrade? Have you used other software solutions of this kind before?

There were no other repricers for us. The optimization, if you want to call it that, took place manually. Most of the time we calculated the prices once and that’s how we sold the product – or not. We have also readjusted some products from time to time, but we carry more than 7,000 items. So, of course, it was impossible for us to always be on the market with the ideal price.

That makes sense! How did you find out about SnapTrade?

Good question. This was via an advertisement we received from SnapTrade. However, the physical proximity was also a decisive factor. We’re based in Leipzig, I’m a native of Saxony and regularly pass through Torgau, where SnapSoft is headquartered. The fact that the company was virtually around the corner was somehow congenial to us. So we just gave the tool a try. The price-performance ratio was very good and the functionality also convinced us, so that we decided after the test phase to want to use the Repricer beyond that.

You use ShopSPY for market monitoring. Can you tell us about your workflow with the tool?

We had been considering using a price optimization tool for our own online stores for some time and had already been in contact with SnapSoft in this regard. Since we have been using price search engines for several years, we knew which price comparison portal is most frequently used by our customers. In our case, that was and is idealo.

Once set up, the workflow with ShopSPY is very simple and straightforward: We send our item data to SnapTrade via .csv file. In doing so, we provide the tool with unique product data such as EAN and product title, which ShopSPY can use to find offers on the price comparison portals. The offer suggestions are sent to us at SnapTrade displayed and we can create the links to our articles.

Based on the min-max price ranges we send to ShopSPY, the tool suggests an appropriate reference price for our online store, which we can automatically import into our ERP system via .csv export. The import and export of the data runs daily and fully automatically. We only have to check the product suggestions at SnapTrade to make any further links to our offers. This takes a maximum of five minutes a day.

What effect has ShopSPY had on your sales?

With ShopSPY, our online store sales have roughly doubled. However, the starting position also offered a great deal of potential for improvement. We had already been selling on Amazon & Co. for years. For a long time, we therefore neglected the online store and the pricing there. Some product prices have not been adjusted for two years or more. We simply had an immense backlog there, which is why the price adjustments had such a strong impact. Suddenly we were selling items that were not competitive before.

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ShopSPY has provided significant sales growth at Shop4All. I wonder if you experience a similar effect? Why don’t you answer the question for yourself and start your free test!

Do you have any other SnapTrade features in use besides ShopSPY?

We use Amazon price optimization, plus the BuyBox MAX strategy, and eBay price optimization. Again, I can say that our visibility has increased noticeably. We are on Amazon much more often in the BuyBox and can generate more sales. How strong the effect is depends a bit on the products. We sell a lot of retail goods where price is always a big issue, but we also have a private label. These areas must be considered separately. Overall, however, we also sell significantly more via the marketplaces with SnapTrade.

Were there any challenges you had to overcome when setting up ShopSPY?

There were some problems with linking the price proposals in the beginning because some links were broken. But here we were in close exchange with SnapSoft, the team reacted immediately and improved the “Add links” process. Since then, the problems no longer occur.

We will pass it on! Then we are almost at the end with our questions. The question that remains is what’s next for you with Shop4All. What projects do you have planned?

We have already implemented one of our biggest projects for 2023: We changed our ERP system at the beginning of the year and integrated it into our business processes. The goal here was to enable us to work even more effectively and quickly. That kept us busy for a couple of weeks. In addition, we are planning to expand our own online store to Switzerland, where we also have our own branch. We then want to sell there on the Amazon counterpart, the Galaxus marketplace.

You’ve definitely got your work cut out for you there. However, we are convinced that your project will succeed and you will also sell successfully in Switzerland! Mr. Weidner, many, many thanks for the great insights into your company and your handling of ShopSPY.