Q&A: Moritz Thoma, CEO and Founder, Grips,
Moritz Thoma is the CEO and Founder of Grips, a transaction intelligence platform to help retailers and brands understand how the world buys products online.
Can you tell us a bit about your background?
Sure, the company was founded in Berlin in 2018. We have been providing data on online sales to the financial services industry since 2020.
We just launched our Transaction Intelligence platform for corporate customers, enabling retailers and manufacturers to gain competitive visibility into e-commerce product-level sales.
What does your company do? / What is your USP?
Grips makes product sales visible across tens of thousands of online retailers globally. This information helps manufacturers and retailers sell more.
No one but Grips has the data, so the USPs of our Transaction Intelligence platform are SKU-level, cross-retailer sales data.
What’s special about the platform and your approach?
It’s really the fact that we’re computing these e-commerce sales with high precision that is unique. That’s possible due to the technological advantages we’ve developed over the past five years, including a leading product mapping and classification engine and a large set of first-party data to train models.
What advantage does it add?
Retailers use the data to understand sellout and demand across their competitors and to improve their marketing strategies, particularly paid and organic search, as these are the first two traffic channels we generate sales data for.
Manufacturers use the data to increase their e-commerce sales. It helps them better talk to retailers and they’ll manage to increase sellout via assortment, pricing, and further adjustments.
How does a product/service implementation actually look like and how do you measure success?
Our customers either use our services via our SaaS platform or – often the larger retailers – via data access, such as Snowflake. Ultimately, success is measured by how our clients leverage this data to increase their sales.
How are retailers using your systems to gain competitive advantage and what does best practice look like? Can you share a case study with us?
Retailers use the data to see the sales of their competitors – initially, this is limited to search channels but over time, they’ll receive an accurate and full picture. This helps them adjust assortment, pricing, and marketing strategies.
Are there other companies you partner with?
Yes, our Transaction Intelligence platform is used by a broad range of savvy clients to get great insights into e-commerce, from hedge funds to tier-1 consultancies.
What challenges and opportunities do you see in UK retail for 2023 / What challenges are retailers facing in 2022?
Retailers and brands around the world are struggling with inflation and economic uncertainty leading many consumers to reduce or delay spending. At the same time, labour shortages and global supply chain disruptions have made it costlier and more difficult to provide consumers with the goods they want at a price they’re willing to pay. Many consumers are responding by actively seeking deals on name-brand products or looking to switch to a more affordable option, including private label brands.
Here’s an example from the data analysis that we did a couple of months ago looking at consumers’ grocery shopping behaviour in the US, UK, France and Germany. We saw consumer spending fall by nearly a quarter across branding products in fresh produce categories (fruits, vegetables, meat, seafood and eggs), due to the current costing pressures of rising petrol prices and energy costs being passed onto the consumer in almost real-time because of the limited shelf life of the products.
How will you address these challenges and turn them into successes?
With deal-seeking behaviours on the rise, consumers are more likely to consider doing business with a retailer that they don’t typically buy from. Grips is optimally positioned to help retailers and brands identify the products that consumers are shopping for on Google and the retailers that are getting those sales. Staying informed of these trends will ensure that retailers and brands can have the right merchandising assortment, proper product page optimization and pricing and shipping policies that are competitive with those winning the day.
What is on the horizon for you as a company?
We’re building our Transaction Intelligence platform to include all online sales of every retailer globally and aim to become the 21st century Nielsen.
Any final thoughts?
We’re all excited for e-commerce to continue its growth and support our clients to make the best of it.
To find out how Grips can help your retail operation, follow them here: Website, LinkedIn, Twitter
