Changelog

Report Credits

The new Report Center is out of Beta. In order to meet demand from customers, we have introduced a credit system for each report generated. We've granted all teams credits based on the number of competitors tracked.

For each report that is about to be generated, you will now see a preview of the credits that will be consumed by generating that report. The number of credits used maps directly to the number of rows that will be included in the report. To preserve credits, consider using filters or smaller date ranges to reduce the number of rows (and thus the number of credits) that will be included.

We've granted enough credits to cover the historical usage of the vast majority of customers. If you need more credits, please reach out to your account manager.

New Report Generator

To better support your internal workflows, we've rebuilt the Report Center so that more data and be exported, easier. Export at the Company, Product, or Variant (SKU) level. Select specific columns, filter to specific Product Types, and more!

To get started:

1. Navigate to Report Center
2. Select your Competitor, Time Frame, Columns, and Filters
3. Click "Generate Report" to download your report

Scheduled Email Reports

By popular demand, we've added the ability to schedule the delivery of a PDF report via email. Instead of needing to log in to the app to view data, you can now have it delivered to your inbox on a daily, weekly, or monthly basis. This feature is available to all users.

Interesting use cases this enables include:

• Receiving an email of the previous month's sales for your team before a Monday planning meeting
• Getting a report of a customized dashboard to fill you in one price adjustments on a daily basis
• A monthly summary email of all newly launched products by competitors in a certain vertical or product type

To enable a scheduled report:

1. Click on the Bell icon in the top right of the page you want to receive
2. Fill out the form with the details of the report
3. Click save - you're all set!

Swap Out Competitors

In order to better serve you, we've added the ability to swap out a competitor for another one. This is useful if you've made a mistake in adding a competitor, or if you want to replace one with another. The only requirement is that each competitor must be kept for at least 30 days.

You can do this at anytime on the Manage Competitors page.

New Stable Features

We've been listening to feedback on many of our Beta tools and are excited to announce that the following features are now available as stable additions to Particl:

• Custom Dashboards
• Brick & Mortar Research

The following features that have been available in trial period until the end of the year are also being made available on all plans:

• Copilot (Benchmarking & White Space)
• Market & Trend Analysis

All plans will include 2 Custom Dashboards at no charge, but additional features will require an upgrade to your plan in order to access them. Some customers have been grandfathered into features that they've already had access to, reach out to your account manager if you have any questions, all available features are visible to Admin users on the Admin page.

Modifications to Managing Competitors

To try and make the process of managing competitor datasets within your organization easier, we've also combined the Add Companies page with the Requested Companies and Purchased Companies tables from the Admin page, they are now all available under the same Manage Competitors page.

You can add, remove, and explore all companies Particl offers through this page, or request that a domain we don't currently track be added to our system.

As part of this change, the following processes have been simplified in an attempt to make the customer experience more streamlined:

1. Token cost on all competitor datasets has been removed, all competitors cost an equal amount.
2. All customers now have unlimited swaps of competitor datasets, but competitors can only be swapped after they've been a part of your account for 30 days to discourage misuse.

Announcing Custom Dashboards

We're thrilled to unveil our latest innovation: Custom Dashboards. This powerful new tool is designed to expand the capabilities of how you can interact with data in the Particl app. With complete customization capabilities, you can now create dashboards that are as unique as your team needs.

Each dashboard comes equipped with its own set of filters, offering you the flexibility to compare complex data sets in a side-by-side view. For instance, integrated customers are now able to create dashboards that compare their own product data with their competitors' in any form or visualization.

During our beta phase, Dashboards are available to you at no extra cost. We invite you to take advantage of this opportunity to explore the full range of features without any commitment. Post-beta, Dashboards will transition to a paid add-on, enhancing our suite of premium tools.

Particl has set up some example dashboards for many high-usage customers, as well as built a suite of templates to help you see what's possible.

Now available: Brick & Mortar Data on Select Retailers

As part of Particl's mission to expand the breadth and depth of competitor data that you have access to, we're pleased to announce Brick & Mortar Research. Available today, see in store sales data for both US and Canada with the same SKU-level detail and accuracy that you've come to love in the Particl platform.

Introducing Particl Copilot

We’re happy to announce our most ambitious product update to-date: Particl’s AI Copilot. Using your product performance data, Copilot uses AI to automatically match your products to your closest competitors and pull out the top insights for you to easily digest. From market share to new product opportunities to mispriced products, our new Toolkit will significantly increase your performance at a fraction of the time spent.

To begin, we’re releasing 2 of Copilot’s initial tools, Benchmarking and White Space. Benchmarking will compare your Sales, Product Types, and Products to competitors you designate to call out areas you’re leading and opportunities to improve. White Space compares your product catalog against your competitors to identify most profitable areas not currently offered.

If you’re already integrated, these tools are already live for you. If you are not, please reach out to your Account Manager to get started today.

Universal Product Taxonomy

We are thrilled to announce the launch of the first universal Product Taxonomy for e-commerce. Our team has spent the last few months utilizing AI to standardize the classification of every product in the Particl database.

With this new taxonomy, you can easily compare the performance of product categories across all of your tracked competitors. Discover the fastest growing categories, ideal price ranges, discounts, and more.

The Product Type filter and the Product Types tables in both the Product Research tool, Competitor Research tool, and Assortment Analysis tool have been updated to reflect these changes.

Sentiment Analysis for All Datasets

To help you better understand how customers feel about competitor products, we've added tracking of reviews to standard and premium datasets throughout the platform. More than 60% of datasets are already tracking reviews, and we'll be adding more in the coming weeks. Over time, this data will power more interesting use cases for you to explore, but for now, you can:

• view the average rating, and total number of reviews on a given product
• filter by the average rating, or number of reviews on product research pages
• sort by the highest rated, or most reviewed products

Many retailers, include no reviews at all on their product pages, and other retailers require customizations to our data collection process to track reviews. In these cases, you will not see any reviews. If you're interested in seeing data for a specific retailer, please reach out to support.

Other additions

• The Not operator: filters like product type, keyword, and material now allow you to exclude results of a specific type
• Including raw/AI colors in exports: CSV exports of variant level data now includes both the retailer-specific raw color, as well as the Particl categorized AI color

Announcing our Expansion into Coverage of All Companies

This week, previously un-tracked retailers are being made available, and we are expanding our coverage to be capable of tracking all companies. The Particl app now includes "Standard Datasets" for tracking of key metrics like assortment, price, product launches, and more, whereas "Premium Datasets" that include sales and inventory metrics will continue to be available as they have in the past.

Newly tracked Standard company datasets are available at 1/2 the cost of Premium Datasets. Data from Premium Datasets is also marked with a Premium badge throughout the app.

These changes are already reflected in-app. You can add these companies to your account using the same workflow. Some newly tracked companies include:

• Zara
• H&M
• Nike
• Sephora
• and more...

Other changes

In accordance with these changes, we've made a few other adjustments to the app:

• Price on product tables is now displayed as a "Price Range" where applicable, rather than a single price. This helps show a more accurate reflection of the current price at any given time
• The data on display for a Competitor Collection has been moved to the Product Research page, and editing of a collection has been moved to the Collection Settings page, which can be accessed with a 3 dot menu next to a collections name in the sidebar
• The product types filter has been removed from the Add Companies page as it no longer aligns with the AI categorized models we've created for other product types. we'll be adding this back in the future

Deprecations & Sunsets

• The "Exports" tab has been removed from the app. Please reach out to support if you are looking for a specific report that you can no longer create from another tool.

New Additions

Assortment Analysis

Conduct a comprehensive analysis of any market to identify gaps, redundancies, and opportunities for improvement, so you can better align your own product offering with the market. Use the same powerful filters to identify a narrow subset of products like UPF clothing, before comparing price points across retailers.

Variants Pivot Table

In addition to comparing company assorments, you can also pivot data on individual products to compare which colors and sizes are outperforming others.

Improvements

• Much faster performance on reports of limited date ranges.
• Using Current Price instead of Average Price for more accurate price comparisons.
• New searchable directory for all tracked companies, to make it easier to jump between individual brands.

Announcing a Powerful Upgrade to Product Research

We are excited to announce a major upgrade to our Product Research functionality. Our team has been hard at work integrating a suite of features, including Product Research, Product Analysis, Price Research, Price Analysis, Trending Products, and New Products, into a singular, comprehensive tool. This enhanced tool is now available to all users, effective immediately.

Our new tool simplifies your research process, providing an intuitive interface to search and visualize data in a singular, user-friendly view. You can now get all the insights you need in one place, making your data analysis faster and more efficient.

You also have the ability to fine-tune your searches with a variety of filters including Product Type, Material, Keyword, and more, providing the flexibility to customize your data exploration.

For a complete rundown of these new features and how to utilize them, check out the full details on our help center.

This upgrade reflects our commitment to making our platform increasingly user-centric and efficient. We believe this tool will significantly improve your research and decision-making process. As always, we appreciate your feedback and look forward to supporting your needs in the most effective way possible.

Deprecations & Sunsets

• Trending Products & Product Launches: these features have been moved into the Product Research suite, and are no longer available as standalone features. To see the top Trending Products & Product Launches you can modify the sort applied to the top products table in Product Research.

Improvements

• Better reliability with cache clearing utility
• Proper formatting of cells exported from company recent events tables

New additions

• Top Brands: explore the fastest growing companies Particl tracks and how much they are growing from one simple dashboard.

• Aggregating Company sales by interval: rollup data for company sales by day, week, or month from the products tab, supporting behavior that exists elsewhere in the app.

Improvements

• Better reliability with cache clearing utility
• Proper formatting of cells exported from company recent events tables

New additions

• Explore-able Price Histograms: you can now click a price bucket to automatically apply filters on the Price Research page, or select a bucket from the Product Analysis page to highlight those products in the product list.

• Company Request flow: new companies to be added to an account can be added directly to company collections, and the status of your current and out-standing requests are all visible from the Admin tab.

Improvements

• Add products to research collections directly from product details pages.
• Duplicate product research collections.
• Rename product research collections in case you made a typo or have changed the products that comprise a collection.

New additions

• Market & Trend Analysis: a flagship offering we've been building up to for months, Market & Trend Analysis processes data across an entire market and provides you insights like top products, top brands, and sales trends for any keyword.

• Dark Mode: view the app in lower contrast through dark mode by clicking the moon icon on your account page or from the quick find menu.

Improvements

• Added CSV exports from the Recent Events and Trending Products tables within any company.
• Fix a bug where Product Analysis collections were not redirecting you to correct pages upon creation.
• Improved overall load times of Product Analysis collections by ~30%.

New additions

• Trending Products: we launched a new item in the sidebar called Trending Products to give you a quick glance at the products with the highest rate of sales. We've also included Sell Through Rate so you can see what products from your collections are selling out.

• Performance Optimizations: we've moved our data onto new systems that cause pages to load anywhere from 30-500% faster. You'll notice Improvements especially on pages processing large amounts of data, like for companies with many products. These speed improvements make the app browsing experience much snappier.

Improvements

• New doc on Product Confidence Scoring: to explain how we derive our confidence scores, we link to a doc explaining the process.
• Sales Volume as default: we've heard from several customers that they'd like to see sales volume as the default metric on the company pages. We've updated the default to be sales volume, but you can still change it to sales revenue from any chart.
• We've reorganized the sidebar to callout the most important priorities most of our customers are using features for. A few things have been moved around, and renamed:
  • Company Collections are now Competitor Tracking
  • Company Research is now called Company Search
  • Product Collections are now Product Analysis

Deprecations & Sunsets

• Insights: the Insights tab was removed from the app due to feedback that insights weren't as helpful as we intended. To reduce some noise in our navigation and throughout the app we've opted to remove the insights for now. If you have ideas of insights you'd like to see derived from our existing data, we'd love to hear about them.
• Custom Discount Percentages: few customers relied on this feature (and many didn't even know it was available), so we have instead decided to emphasize Sales Volume over Sales Revenue which should report numbers that aren't affected by discounts.

New additions

• Top Products table pagination: we've updated the top products table on company pages to include pagination. This will allow you to view more than 100 products at a time for any given set of filters.

Improvements

• Company sales data now loads up to 2x faster (depending on the company being viewed)
• The Particl API docs have been updated to reflect the latest changes to the API and their relevant fields, most notably:
  • New products endpoint
  • Top products endpoint
  • Company counts endpoint (for product and variant counts)

Deprecations & Sunsets

• Attribution: Our attribution product grew out of a need to provide a way for our customers to track the impact of their marketing efforts. We haven't been able to invest the time and resources needed to make this product a success. Integrations with Shopify and the Particl Pixel will remain for customeres of the Retargeting product, but visualizing the impact of influencer, email, and ad campaigns will no longer be possible.

New additions

AI Data Scoring

Data accuracy is our top priority. Over the last few months, our developers have been working closely with some of the top e-commerce stores to optimize our AI-sales processing algorithms. These new algorithms are currently being deployed.

Over the next few days, you may see numbers slightly adjust as we nudge historical data using the new models. If you have any concerns, please reach out to your customer support rep. In addition, you will now see a Confidence Score on every Company and Product Page. This score is reflective of the accuracy of the data and is there to help transparently display the confidence of every data point in the Particl Platform.

Improvements

• Compact inputs: all inputs are now compact by default, this makes data more prominent on small screens and helps to navigate the app better.
• Company filter on Product Research: you can now filter down product research results to relevant companies you care about, with this filter the Companies top products page has effectively been replaced by Product Research.

Deprecations & Sunsets

We're temporarily retiring a few products with substantially less usage as we rework the underlying data systems that power them. We'll be bringing them back in the future, but for now, they're unavailable.

• Market Insights: We're putting the finishing touches on our Market Research product that is more sophisticated and provides much better insights. When this is complete, it'll replace Market Insights.
• Benchmarking: Competitor data that can be compared in the Benchmarking tool is available elsewhere in app, and the comparison experience isn't used as frequently as we anticipated customers might want it. We're reevaluating how best to help you compare similar data, and will bring some form of this back in the future.

New additions

• Total Revenue and Unit Volume for top products: Listing totals for revenue and unit volume for the Top Products table on the Company Products tab.
• "Only" Filter: Allow selecting "Only" from company filter selections, this affects Product Research, Company Collections, and the New Product Database.
• Granular Revenue filters: Additional revenue filters on Company Research to help you search for smaller to midsize companies.
• API Glossary: Definitions for fields returned by the API added to docs.particl.com.

Other additions

• Displaying the company name by the company with most product launches in the New Product Database
• Sorting top variants by revenue on the Product Details page
• More product links: Linking Recent Events to their product pages from Company Overview pages.

New additions

• Better quick links: We've added additional actions to the Quick Find menu. Try searching by typing ⌘ + K (or Ctrl + K on Windows) and then the name of a company you track. You can also quickly jump to company search with a company name you're interested in.
• Units moved in Company Collections: You can now see the number of units moved in a company collection, instead of revenue which was the default.
• Calling out price changes on product sales: We've added a new indicator to show when a product's price has changed. This is useful when you're looking at a company's product sales and want to see if the price has changed at some point.

Other additions

We cleaned up mobile styles across all pages so that tables render better on small screen sizes like iOS and Android devices.

Fixes

• Fixed delayed input while typing in product search for individual companies.
• Fixed image overlays that sometimes appeared a bit out of place.

New additions

Rebrand

Luz is now Particl! We've change our name and updated our logo to better reflect our mission and values. We've also updated our website to reflect the new branding.

Read more about the change on our website.

New homepage

To make the homepage more useful, we replaced summaries of company details with a list of recently viewed pages, and a directory of linked products. This was added as a way to help you find your way back to what you've been browsing, or what you're hoping to find faster.

New additions

New Product Database

View all new products released in the last 2 weeks for a collection of companies in the New Product Database.

Other additions

• Extended company search. Added additonal companies to our search results to display companies that we are aware of but don't make available due to accuracy or coverage.
• Better descriptive messages for product events like failed product launches and trending products.

Fixes

• Displaying the difference between unknown and 0 inventory amounts on product inventory line charts.
• Disabled mouse-wheel scrolling on numeric inputs for filters in Product Research and Company Research.

New additions

• Better details about Sales Spike insights on the Company Overview page.

Fixes

• Large CSV Exports had trouble finishing for big companies. The underlying mechanism of this was replaced to fix the generation of those reports and make way for future improvements to generate even larger reporst in the future.
• Breadcrumb navigation was sometimes inconsistent when navigating between pages. This was resolved so all pages show the same navigation hierarchy.

Deprecations & Sunsets

• Website Analytics: with relatively low usage, and failure to meet the high standard we hope to achieve on our products, we made the tough call to sunset Website Analytics. We will be removing the product from the dashboard on September 31st, 2022.

New additions

Company Research

We've renamed the Competitor Tracking section of the platform Company Research to better reflect its purpose. Now, tracked companies can be grouped into collections like "Activewear" or "Footwear", for more attuned research into different categories or verticals. Available for all customers tracking competitors. You can find the product in the dashboard sidebar.

Some sections of the app like Product Research have been updated to support these changes. Most customers will have 1 initial collection called "All Companies", and other customers with hundreds of tracked companies will find their companies sorted in predefined named collections. You can customize them however you like, create more, or edit the existing ones.

Deprecations & Sunsets

• Marketing Data: the marketing data tab has been removed from the Company Research portion of the app with these changes. We've found that the data was not as useful as we'd hoped, and we're focusing our efforts on other areas of the app. If you have any feedback on this, please let us know by reaching out to customer support.

New additions

• Better grouping of companies by vertical in company search

Fixes

• Fixed dates on product recent events tables that would sometimes be unable to calculate correctly
• Started grouping events by product or variant based on the event type

New additions

• Dual sidebar layout on product research pages that allows for easier selection of an active product collection
• Added verticals as a column to CSV exports of company search results

Fixes

• Improved security headers for all API endpoints to mitigate possible security threats
• Fixed product images that rendered incorrectly in Safari browsers

Improvements

• Allow selecting "All time" as an option in date range pickers

Fixes

• Fixed heights of overlapping product images rendering on details pages

New additions

Product Research

To enable you to pick out just the best products from companies you are tracking, we built a new tool called Product Research. Similar to Company Search, input the filters and criteria you are looking for and we'll show you the best products that match it.

Sort products into collections and share them with your team. You can also export the list of products to CSV.