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Claimed Product: CP

To deliver the bestLike-Kind-and-Quality replacement suggestions, ValueChecker needs to know what is being claimed (lost, broken or replaced for other reasons). The higher the level of accuracy in describing or selecting the CP, the greater the precision in the replacement suggestions. For the vast majority, every user action for an individual product should always begin with a query to the Product Search endpoint.

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Core Categories

ValueChecker has a curated catalog for many products in the categories of the most claimed products where we aggregate product attributes and apply Product Naming logic. These categories are referred to as Core Categories. They can include, and are not limited to (depending on the market country):
  • Phones
  • Tables
  • Laptops
  • TVs
  • Cameras
  • Earphones & Headphones*
  • Smart watches*
  • Dishwashers
  • Washing machines
  • Hobs
  • Bikes
  • GoPro’s & Video Cameras
*Only popular brands

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Non-core Categories

Categories for everything else. ValueChecker is capable of finding almost any standard product in a majority of categories. The only difference is the higher accuracy and correctness of the product information in the Core Categories.

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Master Product

Master Products is a normalized group of products that are extremely similar to each other. This usually accounts for product color variations or other trivial deviations that make no difference to the price or viability of the product as replacement candidate. If a claimed product can be matched to one of these Master Products, ValueChecker will return the product name by its non-attributive, normalized name (i.e. Samsung Galaxy S9 64GB (2018) instead of Samsung Galaxy S9 Dual Sim 64GB Black). When available, this name is in the /prices response in the key: grouped_prices.[0].[0].product.product_name (0 and 0 being the first (key) product of the first (row) group list in the grouped_prices list for the lowest available price from a recommended shop).

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Replacement Product: RP

At the heart of the ValueChecker service is our Replacement Product technology. It calculates not only what would be suitable Like-Kind-and-Quality replacement products for the claimed product (using our internal product identifier, the pid) but also where it is available for sale and at what price in the country of claim. The Replacement Product endpoint requires a pid to perform these calculations.

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Appraisals

An Appraisal is a dataset of a CP, an RP and any calculations performed on this pair of products. Calculations can be made on:
  • metadata attached to the Appraisal (such as date of purchase and/or date of claim to calculate depreciation)
  • metadata derived from the product (such as the category of CP, cost value of the RP), or a number of manual metadata manipulations.
Appraisals can be grouped together in a cart with a specific Reference that can be defined by your implementation (and/or the user). Appraisals can have downloadable reports generated either at the Appraisal single object level or group cart level (multiple Appraisal Objects).

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The ValueChecker Customer Portal

The Portal is a client branded (white-labeled) tool that allows for customers (policy holders) to directly manage their claimed items in an inventory-styled list.

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Key features

  • Non-PII platform. (non-personally identifiable information). Portal access is managed by known URLs (smart URLs) and optional 4-digit PIN codes.
  • Mobile friendly and responsive design.
  • Image upload capability for both receipts, invoices and photos of claimed items.
  • Universal product input field with category prediction enabled. No category selection required.
  • Built-in search as you type for products from Core Categories.
  • Every client_reference has exactly 1 Portal inventory.

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Key differences to the Valuechecker Standalone web application

  • Items in the inventory are not appraisals (the customers do not select RPs).
  • Pricing or shop availability information is not shown.

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Interaction with the ValueChecker API

  • Items are loaded into client_references and are evaluated with RPs to become appraisals.
  • Edits to appraisals can be pushed to the Portal to be shown as items in the inventory.