ecobee is a Canadian home automation company founded with the goal of offering people smart home solutions that enable planet-positive actions and lifestyles. Their products range from thermostats to cameras that are controlled using mobile devices and web apps. So far, ecobee smart thermostats have delivered 10.4 TWh of energy savings, which they note is the equivalent of protecting 9,581,313 acres of North American forests or taking 1,557,673 cars off the road for a year.
Prior to working with Zinc Enforcer, ecobee's effort to combat unauthorized sellers and mispriced items involved a cumbersome and resource-intensive mix of litigation, manual buybacks, internal scraping tools, and manual price monitoring. Senior Manager of Strategic Partnerships Greg Gabel found the existing process tough to coordinate: “Buying back 3P units at scale is cost-prohibitive and a slow process. Manually tracking units/pricing is tedious and distracting for ecobee team members, and scraping is just difficult and requires constant technical attention to be reliable long term.”
Simplifying and Automating
Given the small footprint and high value of their products, ecobee’s potential synergy with Zinc Enforcer was readily apparent to Greg. By simplifying the monitoring and enforcement process, Zinc Enforcer helped consolidate resources and cut down on the time and money spent tracking offenders. “I wanted experts in scraping so we could have reliable sources for information,” Greg notes, “And, most importantly, Zinc Enforcer’s auto product buy/return was an amazing capability for us to scale our understanding of where 3P units were coming from.”
As eCommerce channels drive increasing sales and resellers crop up to reap opportunities, Zinc Enforcer has focused ecobee's enforcement pipeline, and strengthened ecobee’s brand authenticity and consumer trust.