DriveMKB

Project description

TopTier Data is a student company consisting of people from various backgrounds including digital business, software engineering and ICT. TopTier Data has been approached by Drive MKB to find- and develop a solution for small-medium entrepreneurs, in the retail branch, who face problems with digitalisation. This is a problem because there could be developed a gap between retail organizations who are using data-driven solutions and the organizations who are not using these solutions. This gap can lead to a competitive advantage for those who do have the insights about their business. This data could be used to help a business get more clients and more revenue. The goal that needed to be achieved in this project was to help entrepreneurs improve their business with the help of data.

Context

During the pandemic of Covid-19, many businesses were forced to close since they lacked digital means to communicate with their customers. This is the main issue for some small restaurants, shops and hotels which will make them stay behind, if the right steps are not taken. However, not every business is passionate about digitalisation, and some entrepreneurs are not willing to take the effort to digitalise their business.

The retail and restaurant industries have been especially severely impacted by the recession, and despite a lot of innovation and entrepreneurship, turnover has remained stable (home deliveries, limited openings, etc.). It has also become evident that these industries are conceptually less resilient to crises and have suffered greatly as a result. Entrepreneurs may take responsibility and increase in resilience by focusing on digital transformation with an emphasis on data-driven choices. In conjunction with a collaborative digital community to compete with bigger corporations and franchisees.

Due to the digitalizing world, there could be developed a gap between the SME’s that use data driven and the ones that are not using it. This gap can lead to a competitive advantage for those who do have the insights about their business. This data could be used to help a business get more clients and more revenue.

Results

In this project we developed multiple webscrapers to scrape data from multiple websites. These websites include Google My Business, Trustpilot, Instagram, LinkedIn & Marktplaats. This project will need a follow-up since the webscrapers need to be further developed and the data needs to be visualized.

About the project group

During this project our group developed knowledge in Python, researched about how small retail businesses operate and made webscrapers in Python.