How to Improve Assortment Using Supplier Data

How can you improve your online store’s assortment to meet market demands and customer expectations? How can you quickly respond to emerging trends and new product launches? And how can you be the first to know when high-demand items become available?

In our previous article, we explored automated supplier price monitoring as a way to save time and boost profitability. In this article, we’ll focus on another key area — expanding your assortment by leveraging distributor data.

Contents:

Expanding Your Assortment: Sources and Challenges

How Pricer24 Helps You Improve Assortment by Simplifying Supplier Monitoring

How to Improve Assortment: Key Recommendations for Category Managers

Expanding Your Assortment: Sources and Challenges

A relevant, diverse, and competitive assortment helps you grow sales, attract new customers, and retain a loyal audience.

For any online store looking to scale, it’s essential to keep the digital shelf up to date and continuously expand product offerings.

There are three main ways to expand a store’s assortment:

• In-house production
• Direct imports
• Purchasing from suppliers (distributors)

Let’s take a closer look at the benefits and challenges of each approach.

In-House Production

Expanding your assortment through manufacturing in-house or launching private label brands offers an opportunity to create a unique product offering, maintain full control over quality, and increase business profitability.

This approach is particularly effective for niche online retailers looking to differentiate themselves from the competition. With in-house production, the majority of profits often come not from the e-commerce operations themselves but from the sale of proprietary products.

However, not all online stores are ready to invest in production capabilities. A more accessible alternative can be launching a private label. For example, ASOS — an online retailer that actively develops its own brands (ASOS DESIGN, ASOS 4505) — uses this strategy to diversify its assortment. ASOS not only sells its own private label products but also operates a marketplace model, combining third-party offerings with its own in-house lines.

Key Benefits:

• Unique value proposition. This strategy allows you to offer products that are not available from competitors.
• Quality control. In-house production enables strict quality assurance, enhancing brand reputation and consumer trust.
• Higher profit margins. Eliminating intermediaries allows for greater profitability.

Challenges and Risks:

• Launching your own production or developing a private label requires significant investment in research and manufacturing capabilities.
• Successfully promoting a new brand demands a strong marketing and advertising budget, especially in the early stages.
• Unpredictable demand can lead to overstocking, which ties up resources and slows inventory turnover.
• Efficient production, logistics, and quality control processes require strong expertise and operational maturity.

In-house production is a strategic move for companies ready to invest in product development, marketing, and operations. It can be highly effective for niche players aiming to build a recognizable brand and offer something truly unique.

Direct Imports

Expanding assortment through direct imports is a strategic approach that enables online retailers to gain a competitive edge by lowering product costs, offering exclusive items, and increasing profit margins. This model is especially popular among niche and midsized online stores looking to optimize profitability within specific product categories.

Direct importing works particularly well in categories where:

• Demand is high but brand competition is limited
  
• Consumers are not strongly brand-loyal and prioritize product features or price
  
• The market lacks certain products, and the importer can position themselves as a key supplier

Typical examples of direct imports include electronics accessories (such as phone cases, charging cables, and adapters) and home goods. Retailers that handle their own imports can offer a wide selection at competitive prices while maintaining control over pricing strategies.

Key Advantages:

• Pricing control: By bypassing distributors, retailers can set more competitive prices or increase margins.
  
• Assortment flexibility: Retailers choose what to import and can quickly respond to market demand.
  
• No intermediaries: Direct procurement from manufacturers reduces costs, allowing more pricing flexibility.
  
• Exclusive products: Importing hard-to-find or unique items not available from competitors becomes a strong differentiator.

Challenges and Risks:

• Financial investment and risk: Direct purchases often require large minimum order quantities, which demand significant upfront capital.
  
• Logistics and customs: Cross-border shipments require efficient supply chain management, customs clearance, and regulatory compliance.
  
• Inventory risk: If a product underperforms, the retailer may be left with unsold stock and tied-up capital.
  
• Warranty and after-sales service: The absence of official manufacturer warranties can be a concern for some customer segments.

Direct imports can be a highly effective strategy for retailers seeking greater pricing control and higher margins. However, this strategy requires mature logistics operations, a solid understanding of the target market, and financial readiness to invest in sourcing and customs procedures.

In short, both in-house production and direct imports offer significant benefits — but they also come with considerable risks. In both cases, two key challenges arise:

1. High marketing budgets: Developing new products or brands requires substantial investment, which may be unrealistic for midsize online retailers.
   
2. Risk of overstock: To be cost-effective, businesses typically need to produce or import large quantities, often without reliable demand forecasts. This leads to potential inventory surplus and frozen capital.

Given these risks, the most accessible option for expanding assortment remains partnering with distributors who offer a broad product selection without requiring major investments in production or import infrastructure.

Sourcing Products from Suppliers (Distributors)

Partnering with distributors is the most effective way to expand product assortment without incurring significant financial risk. Distributors not only supply inventory but also provide the necessary tools and conditions to support efficient category management in online retail.

Suppliers typically offer:

• Stock availability by product group: Access to inventory in required volumes without the need to invest in large batches.
  
• Assortment variety: A wide range of products, including new brands, imported goods, and trending items.
  
• Flexible procurement terms: Options like dropshipping and consignment help reduce operational costs and minimize risk.
  
• Sales forecasts and analytics: Data-driven insights assist in inventory planning and replenishment decisions.

For category managers looking to grow their categories, the first step should be a comprehensive supplier market analysis. This includes mapping the full assortment available in the market and identifying all potential partners (distributors), followed by integrating their offerings into the retailer’s digital shelf.

However, this process also presents several challenges — particularly in monitoring and automating the collection of data related to assortment, pricing, procurement terms, and sales forecasts. Without a structured, systematic approach to managing these data streams, category managers risk missing out on competitive opportunities and losing market share.

How Pricer24 Helps You Improve Assortment by Simplifying Supplier Monitoring

Expanding assortment through suppliers gives online retailers access to a broad range of products — but it also introduces new challenges: quickly analyzing all available SKUs, tracking their market availability, and making informed purchasing decisions.

Manual data collection and processing is a time-consuming, resource-heavy task that prevents businesses from reacting quickly to market changes. The solution is to automate supplier assortment tracking and analysis with the help of Pricer24.

Pricer24 is a SaaS platform for product and pricing analytics that is designed to streamline assortment and price management for midsize and large e-commerce businesses, including online retailers, distributors, and vendors.

The platform offers tools for comprehensive market analysis, including competitor and supplier price and assortment tracking. Let’s explore how Pricer24 collects and processes data, what types of reports are available to users, and how they help category managers make smarter decisions.

Data Collection and Processing

Supplier price monitoring in Pricer24 starts with automated data collection from multiple sources, including:

• B2B distributor portals. Data is retrieved automatically via APIs, providing real-time access to supplier pricing.
• Emails. Price lists received via email are automatically uploaded to the system. Clients typically create a dedicated email address for forwarding supplier price lists.
• Online spreadsheets. Pricer24 supports importing data from Google Sheets.
• Excel files. Clients can manually upload price lists in Excel format when needed.

How is data kept up to date?

A built-in parser regularly scans all specified sources, ensuring that reports in the system always reflect the most current information.

One important aspect of working with price lists is data unification. Since different suppliers may use different column names (for example, “Price” vs “Wholesale Price”), the system automatically maps and standardizes columns, consolidating all price lists into a single, consistent format.

Reports and Analytics: What Tasks Does Pricer24 Handle

Discovering New SKUs

Once supplier price lists are uploaded, Pricer24 helps identify products that are missing from your catalog. This feature is especially valuable for small to midsize retailers who often rely on manual catalog updates and may overlook new or trending items — resulting in missed sales opportunities.

Thanks to automated matching between your catalog and supplier data, the system quickly detects new SKUs, making it easier to expand your assortment and stay ahead of the market.

This report works on simple logic: Show products that are available from the supplier but not yet in the catalog.

Pricer24 automatically detects such SKUs and highlights them with the “New” tag, helping you easily spot new opportunities, expand your assortment, and stay ahead of the competition.

Data-Driven Purchase & Pricing Decisions

The Market Analysis report allows you to evaluate the number of product listings across the market using advanced filters by product characteristics.

For example, you can see how many competitors are selling laptops with a specific processor type.This module also displays the minimum market price, average rating, and number of reviews for each product, giving you a full picture of current demand and competition.

Market analysis allows you to make smarter procurement and pricing choices for in-demand products. If a trendy item in your catalog has limited market availability, you can raise your price to increase profit margins. And if the product is out of stock, you can quickly identify which supplier offers the best terms and restock it ahead of competitors.

Stock Availability and Product Presentation Control

The Assortment Analysis report allows you to compare your own catalog with those of suppliers and competitors, helping you identify products that are running low or are out of stock with competitors. This enables you to respond swiftly to market changes and avoid lost sales.

The Out of Stock Products report helps you quickly identify SKUs that are currently unavailable on your site so you can place orders with your distributors.

If you want to quickly find out where it’s most cost-effective to restock, the Price Comparison report will provide an answer in just a few seconds. Using the product search feature, you can immediately see which suppliers have items in stock and at what prices, allowing you to find the most profitable offer.

The Assortment Dynamics report allows you to track changes in product availability from suppliers over a specified period. This helps you to identify market trends, shortages, and anomalies. For example, if the number of products within certain categories sharply decreases, it may signal increased demand and potential shortages, prompting you to look for opportunities to adjust your purchasing strategy accordingly.

Thanks to the analytical capabilities of Pricer24, category managers can:

• Quickly update their assortment and add new items
• Consolidate data from various sources for comprehensive analysis
• Analyze the market and competitors to make informed pricing decisions
• Monitor product availability with suppliers to prevent potential shortages

Pricer24 enables effective assortment management, enhances profitability, and strengthens competitive positions in the market.

How to Improve Assortment: Key Recommendations for Category Managers

1. Actively collaborate with suppliers: Establishing strong relationships with suppliers is essential for effective category development. This ensures access to up-to-date information about product availability, new arrivals, pricing policies, and special conditions.
2. Automate assortment monitoring: Modern tools for automating assortment analysis allow category managers to receive real-time data on new products and their availability from suppliers and competitors so they can make faster and better-informed decisions.
3. Regularly monitor product categories: It’s important to regularly check the availability of popular and trending products on your site and replenish stock to meet customer demand.
4. Analyze market dynamics: Keeping an eye on changes in the assortment offered by suppliers and competitors helps you identify where shortages or new products are emerging. This enables you to quickly react to market changes and make informed purchasing decisions.
5. Introduce new SKUs: Gradually expanding the assortment with new products that meet market demands and consumer preferences is key to staying ahead of trends. Staying ahead of trends ensures you offer products that appeal to your audience and outpace competitors.
6. Control and analyze costs: Regularly monitoring procurement costs helps you make efficient purchasing decisions and achieve your desired level of profitability.