Data Collection & Dashboard Requirements Template
Organize the items below before requesting outsourcing to receive an accurate quote.
Collection Targets
Data Cleansing
Alert Conditions
Dashboard Requirements
Environment / Security
Providing 5 example URLs significantly speeds up the estimation process. Sample data or screenshots are also very helpful.
Ready to submit your request?
Send us your requirements and get a free quote within 24 hours.
Use this template and submit your requestA filled example
Below is how a request for a competitor price dashboard was filled in. For collection, "from where, what, how often" is the whole thing.
- One-line summary
- We check five sellers of the same items daily by hand. We want to be told when something changes.
- Sources
- Three open marketplaces and two competitor own-brand stores. We will supply the list of addresses.
- Fields
- Product name, list price, discounted price, sold-out flag, review count. Only the 80 products we specify.
- How often
- Once daily at 9am.
- What we want to see
- Five prices per item on one row for comparison, a 30-day trend chart, and a marker where someone is cheaper than us.
- Alerts
- A message when anyone goes 5% or more below our price.
- Retention
- Two years. We need to pick a past date and see that day’s prices.
- Who uses it
- Four merchandisers. An Excel export would help.
- Budget and schedule
- Around 6 million KRW, six weeks.
Putting a number on the scope — "only 80 products" — narrows the price immediately. "All products" means taking the whole site structure apart and lands a band higher.
What moves the price and the schedule
Collection is priced by the nature of the sources, the frequency and the retention period. Screen count matters less than people expect.
The simplest band. A matter of weeks.
An access method has to be built and kept working. One band up.
Every five minutes over two years changes the server and query design, and the running cost with it.
Dashboard screens cost roughly the same either way. Almost all of the price sits in collection, so leading with the list of source addresses and the frequency gets you a quote faster.
What happens after you hire us
First we take one source and collect a single day from it. Whether anything blocks us, and whether the values come out right, shows up here. Once that works we add the rest, and only then build the screens. Doing it the other way round leaves you with a clean dashboard and no numbers to put in it. Once a few days of data have piled up we tune the trend charts and the alert thresholds.
Worth settling before you hire
Making the list of source addresses is the fastest start. Difficulty varies site by site, so the addresses alone give half the quote. Then note what you are actually reading on those pages — what you check by eye is what needs collecting. Last, write one line on the decision you will make from the numbers, and we design the screens around that decision. Dashboards that look good and go unused are usually missing that line.
What goes wrong when a field is left blank
Each site blocks differently, so difficulty varies. We need the addresses before we can quote.
Two years of price history is a lot of rows. Server cost and query design change with it.
Alert on every change and dozens arrive daily until nobody reads them. A threshold is what makes it useful.