FREQUENTLY ASKED QUESTIONS
Twenty-seven questions,
and the answer is never “it depends”.
These are the questions that come up in almost every conversation, in the order they get asked. If yours is not here, an email is faster than reading on.
WHAT IT IS
First things first: what are you buying.
What does Skuply actually do?
Skuply measures which attributes in your webshop are empty, fills what can be derived from your own titles and descriptions, and keeps that up to date with every new SKU. It is a connection, a pipeline and a monthly report. See What it does.
Is it a tool or a service?
A service with a dashboard attached. There is no screen somebody on your team has to work in to get a result. The dashboard is there to look at and to clear the review list, not to live in.
From how many products does this make sense?
From around five thousand SKUs. Below that you can do it by hand, and by hand is then also better. The pain starts where nobody can hold the whole catalogue in their head any more.
We already have a PIM. What does this add?
A PIM is a cabinet. It keeps what you put in it and fills nothing. Skuply fills, and it can write to your PIM just as well as to the shop. See the comparison.
Who is behind it?
Skuply is a product by AImplement. You speak to the person who builds it, not to an account manager who passes it on. See About Skuply.
SAFETY AND MISTAKES
The question under all questions: will this thing put nonsense in my shop.
What do you never touch?
Price, stock, lead time, MPN and warranty are neither read nor written. GTIN and EAN are never generated and we do not look them up anywhere. If your shop holds no value, the field stays empty. See Safety.
What happens when the model is not sure?
Every derived value gets a number saying how direct the source is. Anything below 0.85 does not go to your shop but to the review list, with the source attached. The threshold is a setting; lower than 0.70 is not something we do.
Can we roll something back?
Per field and per pass, months afterwards. Every value exists twice: in our own namespace with source and timestamp, and mirrored into the field your shop actually uses. That is why rolling back is one action.
Does anything go live straight away?
No. For the first two weeks nothing is public. The first pass writes to draft, you approve two hundred products, and only then does the rest go live.
How do we know it works and it is not just the season?
That is what the holdout is for. At the start we set aside two thousand products we deliberately never touch. That group moves with the season and not with us, so the difference is readable.
CONNECTING AND TECHNOLOGY
What has to happen on your side.
Do we have to install anything?
No. No plugin, no app, no extension. One API key with read rights on the catalogue and write rights on products and attributes. Connecting takes about half an hour on your side.
Which platforms does it work on?
WooCommerce, Shopify and Magento each have their own page, because the pitfall differs per platform. If your shop runs on something else with an API, that is a conversation and not a no.
Will our site get slower?
No. No code is added to your installation, and we write in blocks outside peak hours. On large catalogues we spread the writes across the night.
How long does the first pass take?
Three weeks from key to full catalogue, and for the first two of those nothing goes live anywhere. After that a new SKU goes along in the next day’s pass. See Connecting.
We sell in several languages.
Then we fill per language. An attribute with its own taxonomy per language gets its own normalised value per language. Translating existing copy is a different job from deriving it again, and we do the second.
We have fields you must stay away from.
Those go on the exclusion list: categories, brands or individual fields. Often that is brand copy from the supplier, or a category somebody has just been through by hand.
PRICE AND TERMS
Two amounts, and no quote.
What does it cost?
A monthly amount that follows from the number of SKUs, from € 249 to € 999 excluding VAT, and bespoke above that. Plus a one-off first pass at € 0.10 per SKU. See Pricing.
Do we pick a tier ourselves?
No. We count the SKUs in your sitemap and the rate follows from that. If you grow past a boundary, the rate moves with you on the first of the next month.
Is there an annual contract?
No, cancellable monthly. Paying a year up front is allowed, with two months off, but it is not required and it changes nothing about the service.
Can we try it first?
There is no free pilot, because a pilot is a project and that costs you more time than money. We do enrich twenty-five of your own products before we speak, and there are thirty days money back.
Do you charge on results?
No. Attribution in e-commerce is a swamp in which everybody finds their own number. Fixed price, a holdout of two thousand products and a dashboard you can look into yourself.
What differs per tier?
Little, and that is deliberate. The safety, the checks and the report are in all of them. What differs is the number of shops, custom attributes, API access and response time.
DATA AND PRIVACY
Whose it is, and where it sits.
Who owns the data you write?
You do. Everything we wrote sits in your shop and stays there, also when you stop. We have no button that takes it back out.
Do you use our catalogue to train anything?
No. Your catalogue is used to fill your catalogue. What we learn from the work sits in the rules and the tables, not in a model tuned on your assortment.
Where does it sit?
Processing and storage inside the EU. No catalogue goes to a party outside the EU. The sub-processors are named in the data processing agreement.
What do you keep, and for how long?
The log per field, because without that log rolling back is impossible. Nothing else you do not already have yourself. On request we delete the log within thirty days.
When do we sign the data processing agreement?
Before the key is created, not after. That is not a formality afterwards but the condition for starting.
QUESTION NOT LISTED
Then the answer is probably more interesting than this page.
Twenty minutes with the person who builds it. No presentation, your catalogue on the table. Or measure first: it costs you nothing and nobody.