The Challenge

Wucato Marketplace GmbH was founded in 2015 as an independent startup of the Würth Group and aims to optimize purchasing processes for businesses. As a central online marketplace for craft and industrial supplies, Wucato connects business customers with a wide range of suppliers. In addition, Wucato offers modern e-procurement functionalities. This makes procurement easier for buyers and at the same time simplifies customer acquisition for suppliers.

Today, Wucato is one of the leading German e-commerce platforms for companies and offers around 20 million products in a broad product range on its marketplace. In order to be able to offer these large quantities of product data, which are provided by suppliers in a wide variety of formats, in the best possible way, they have to be transferred efficiently and promptly into the company's own systems.

This also includes correctly assigning the relevant product information from suppliers to the navigation structure of Wucato. Only in this way can the customer find the desired products quickly and efficiently in this huge universe of products. Consistent search filters that display the correct products throughout the entire search process and thus essentially lead to the purchase decision are central. To master this challenge, Wucato relies on the product data onboarding expertise of Onedot.

How Onedot Helped

For marketplaces, the faster products are brought online with the complete and correct description from the unstructured and differently structured catalogs of the manufacturers, the better. In order to not only support this process, but also to automate it to the maximum, Wucato relies on the modern AI-driven onboarding process from Onedot.

In a first step, the different manufacturer catalogs are loaded into the Onedot platform. Then the platform is used to automatically map the attributes of the suppliers to the attributes of Wucato. The software displays a so-called confidence level for each mapping proposal. This indicates how confident the software was in assigning the attributes. This enables the user to check the suggestions in a focused way. If the software's suggestion is wrong, the user can override the suggestion at any time. This feedback is fed back into the Onedot platform and the machine learning model for the mapping is refined, making future mapping suggestions more accurate. Validated mappings are used in the next catalog update and no longer need to be reviewed.

In order to increase the usability of the search filters, in a final step the attribute values are assigned to the value lists of Wucato and thus filter attributes are standardized. Especially in a business field like Wucato, uniform numbers and the correctly converted units per category are very important for the comparability of products and thus the purchase decision by the end customer.

During the entire onboarding process, all steps and checks are transparently displayed to the user and also saved so that each data transformation per step can be retraced if necessary. If certain data transformations were not correct, the user can jump back to the designated point and correct them afterwards.

The Result

Since the beginning of the collaboration, more than 6 million products from different suppliers could be loaded onto the platform and prepared for Wucato's refined data model thanks to the Onedot onboarding process. Around 29,000 different source attributes could be mapped to over 1,900 target attributes.

By using Onedot, Wucato can focus more on the expansion of the marketplace, cultivate deeper supplier relationships and focus on the expansion of customer-relevant assortments. The use of the Onedot product data platform enables Wucato to continuously and automatically publish products on different channels and to use state-of-the-art AI-supported technology to further scale the expansion of the product range.