How CEF Increased Efficiency

About the Client

City Electrical Factors is a limited company established in 1951, so it has been around for a long time! They’ve started with one branch at that time and until 2001, they’ve reached exactly 400 branches which is a huge success and jump in their story.

As they expressed, “CEF will have a branch near to you!”. At the moment, they’re the leading company in the UK for Electrical Wholesale Network and they’re also operating globally in North America, Spain, Australia, and Ireland. As Prisync, we had a chance to meet with CEF when their automated price tracking need has occurred.

They’ve launched their e-commerce site in 2014 and they have almost half-million visits per month.

In this case study, you will read how CEF reached its full potential using Prisync as told by Paul Gray, the Digital Marketing Executive of CEF. He has a background in e-commerce and especially in data-driven companies which helped him have a data-focused point of view during the decision processes.

Pain Points Before Prisync

Paul said that “Our competitor price tracking system was based on a manual process before we started using Prisync. At first, it wasn’t a big deal for us to track our competitors, but once the market matured and the number of competitors dramatically increased, it became a real struggle for us, and the need for automated price tracking was born.

Sounds familiar, right? Especially, the number of competitors can be surprising to you once you start discovering them because it’s super easy to start an e-commerce business in today’s world compared to the old days!

To sum up, the problem for CEF was that they couldn’t manage to track their competitors’ prices manually because of the number of competitors and also the number of the items they’d like to track.

Starting with Prisync

One of the beautiful sides of their story was that they have found Prisync through a recommendation from one of our current customers, Schneider Electric UK while they were struggling to track their competitors’ prices.

After the recommendation, we have given a try to Prisync whilst we were trying out other services at the same time. It wasn’t that hard to move forward with Prisync as the other services around seemed more complex and not that easy to use.

Paul Gray / Digital Marketing Executive at CEF

Results After Prisync

Before Prisync, they were only able to track 100 products on a few competitors with 2 full time working employees as it’s really hard to tack the competitors’ prices manually.

At the beginning of their Prisync usage, they’ve started with the smallest plan which supports tracking up to 100 products on an unlimited number of competitors. In a short while, they saw the value and they upgraded to the next plan to track more products.

According to Paul’s words, “We have seen phenomenal results with Prisync so that we have decided to upgrade to get more value from Prisync”.

Currently, they have 2 employees on this project but the number of products and competitors they’re able to track has dramatically increased to almost 6000 in almost 900 different competitors. If we make a quick comparison, they have increased their range 10K times in terms of the data they were able to track by adapting automated price tracking.

Paul summarized Prisync as “With Prisync, we spend less time manually updating spreadsheets and more time finding insights that help the business grow”.

Next steps

When we asked Paul what the best use cases are at Prisync, he said that “For us, being able to have all the data that we need to be presented in an easy way to understand and the dashboard makes it really easy to make informed decisions. Looking to the year ahead, having an API available to pull data from Prisync is going to be incredibly useful for a number of projects that we’re working on”.