Service Concepts
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.
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
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.
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).
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.
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).
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.
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.
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.
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.