Russian high-quality-food retailer Azbuka Vkusa has implemented a smart pricing system developed by SaaS company GoalProfit to predict customer demand for specific product groups in real time based on big data.

The model focuses on such demand drivers as seasonality, promotional activity, inventory levels, price elasticity of demand and assortment rotation, and, at the same time, takes into account the costs of store re-evaluation, with more than 40 pricing rules and competitor data.

The pilot project with Texas-based GoalProfit was launched a year ago and, in November, it began to be scaled up to all the chain’s stores. Azbuka Vkusa’s pricing team experts worked with GoalProfit to develop the system and test hypotheses.

More than ten billion data records over two years were used to create the platform, including product, store, price, inventory and assortment data.

The goal of Azbuka Vkusa is to automate price formation and move to data-driven decision-making. The company maintains that the speed of price changes in the market, as well as constant fluctuations in customer demand, require a shift to more dynamic and differentiated pricing, positing that a smart pricing approach helps keep inflation in check and keep products affordable for customers, without losing sales.

In addition to recommending price changes, the platform offers quick access to several years of financial data, an interface with reporting capabilities, a demand forecasting model based on historical sales data, a business process for price reconciliation between departments, and a simulator of different pricing strategies. The low-code platform is easy to use and capable of flexible customisation, without long development cycles.

“We selected GoalProfit as the fastest and most flexible for pricing and product analytics,” said Denis Sologub, president of the Azbuka Vkusa retail chain. “It allowed us to build our own efficient process with the unique, customer-centric business model of Azbuka Vkusa.”

Azbuka Vkusa specialises in the high-quality-food segment of Russian retail, with RUB74.6bn of sales in 2020. The omnichannel grocery retailer has diversified portfolio of formats that include 113 city supermarkets, 60 convenience stores and an online platform. It has a product range of 18,000 SKUs, including 4500 unique SKUs, of which 18.9% of sales are from its production.

GoalProfit is an SaaS provider of a low code retail optimisation platform empowering retailers to build customised intelligence applications.