Getting Started: Onboarding

Aperture runs a short guided setup before you enter the app. You create your account partway through the flow, at step 4, so the first few steps run before you sign in. At the end you have a ready workspace pre-loaded with demo pricing data generated from your company, its categories, the retailers or competitors you track, and the language detected for your company. The Market you pick sets the target market for the generated data, so products are priced in that market’s local currency. You can explore every feature immediately. No data upload is required.

The setup has six steps: What are you monitoring? → Building your market view → Review your market → Account → Activating your workspace → Enter workspace.

Step 1: What are you monitoring?

Choose the perspective that best describes your role:

Option	When to choose it
Brand	You want to monitor how a brand is sold across retailers.
Retailer	You want to compare a retailer against competing retailers.

This choice determines your workspace perspective for all later screens. You can switch perspectives later from the app header, when that toggle is enabled for your workspace.

You also enter your brand or retailer website, for example nike.com or bestbuy.com. The field is labelled “Brand website” or “Retailer website” once you have picked an option. A green tick appears once the URL is recognised, along with a line reading “Using” followed by the cleaned-up address “as your starting point.” The next step uses the site to seed AI-generated market suggestions.

Tip

If you arrive at the onboarding page with a ?context= or ?perspective= parameter and a &url= parameter already in the URL, for example from a marketing landing page, both fields are pre-filled and the step advances automatically.

Step 2: Building your market view (brief loading)

After you confirm your type and website, a short animated screen runs. Its title is “Building your market view”. While it runs, the AI analyses your company and generates a draft market configuration. The checklist it cycles through is:

1. Market configuration complete
2. Identifying competitors
3. Building dashboards
4. Loading pricing insights

This typically takes a few seconds. Once the AI call completes, the screen advances automatically.

Step 3: Review your market

You arrive at the “We’ve set up your market” screen. An AI-generated configuration is already filled in. A market snapshot panel at the top shows live readiness indicators:

• Retailers / Competitors selected. The number of monitored entities you have chosen.
• Est. daily observations. A projection of how much pricing data your configuration will collect.
• Confidence trend. Not started, Building, or Improving, depending on how many entities you have selected.
• Demo coverage. A percentage bar comparing your selections against what the AI suggested. At 75% or higher it is captioned “Rich market picture”; from 40–74% it is captioned “Partial picture”; from 1% to 39% it is captioned “Add retailers to see more” (“Add competitors to see more” in the retailer perspective). At 0% the bar is empty and there is no caption.

Below the snapshot you can review and adjust:

• Company name and Url. Company name is suggested by the AI from your website (falling back to a name derived from the domain if the suggestion is unavailable), and Url is the website you entered in step 1. Edit either if needed.
• Context. Brand or Retailer. You can change it here without going back.
• Market. The primary geographic market. The dropdown offers ten standard markets: United States, United Kingdom, Germany, France, Spain, Italy, Netherlands, Sweden, Japan, and Australia. If the AI’s suggested market for your company is not one of those ten, that market is added to the top of the list.
• Categories. A tag list of product categories relevant to your company. The AI suggests them, and you can edit all of them.
• Retailers to monitor in the brand perspective, or Competitors to monitor in the retailer perspective. The entities to track. The AI pre-selects 5 to 8 and lists more suggestions below the field. Click any suggested entry to add it.

If the list is empty, a warning asks you to add at least one retailer or competitor, because pricing and MAP violation data cannot be generated without one.

Click Update to regenerate the AI suggestions from your company name, URL and context. This replaces the Categories and Retailers/Competitors lists with fresh AI suggestions, so any manual edits to those two fields are lost. Your chosen Market is kept. If the refresh fails, a message says so and your current setup is kept. Update and the View your market insights button are unavailable while a refresh is running or while the Company name field is empty. View your market insights also stays disabled until you have selected at least one retailer or competitor. When you are satisfied with the configuration, click View your market insights to continue to account creation.

Tip

The more retailers or competitors you add and the more categories you include, the richer your initial data set. Adding at least three entities moves the confidence trend from Building to Improving.

Step 4: Create or sign in to your account

Clicking View your market insights takes you to the account step, titled “Unlock your market insights”, where you create a new account or sign in with an existing one. There are three sign-in options:

• Continue with Google. Single-click OAuth via Google, including Google One Tap if your browser detects an active session.
• Continue with LinkedIn. OAuth via LinkedIn.
• Email and password. Enter your first name, last name, work email, and a password of at least 8 characters, then click Create account. A six-digit verification code is sent to your email. Enter it on the next prompt and click Verify email to confirm your address. You can request a new code with Resend code if needed.

No credit card is required at this stage.

Once you finish signing in or verifying your email, the flow moves straight on to the activation screen.

If you are already signed in when you reach this step, the screen shows your name and email with a confirmation checkmark. Click the continue button to go on, or sign out from there if you need to switch accounts first.

Note

By continuing, you agree to the import.io Terms & Conditions and Privacy Policy.

See Account & Sign-in for more detail on authentication options and managing your account after setup.

Step 5: Activating your workspace

After you sign in, workspace generation starts and the “Finalizing your workspace” progress screen opens. The subtitle names the site and perspective being prepared, for example the domain followed by “Brand”, so parallel runs are easy to tell apart. The screen shows six steps, and each one ticks off as its work completes:

1. Generating product catalog. An AI model creates a product catalog relevant to your company and your chosen categories, in the language detected for your company.
2. Enriching product images. Product images are fetched for the generated catalog.
3. Matching competitor products. Your catalog items are matched against products from your tracked retailers or competitors.
4. Simulating market history. Pricing events across your tracked retailers or competitors are generated to populate charts and analytics.
5. Building analytics indexes. Projections are built so the Dashboard, Prices, and other pages have data to display.
6. Finalizing insights. This completes activation. Your workspace is marked complete and your welcome email is sent.

This step takes up to 3 to 4 minutes. You can leave the browser tab open. The screen advances automatically when generation finishes.

If an error occurs, a Retry button appears. Click it to restart the activation. You do not need to re-enter your configuration.

If the screen loses its connection to the server for about three minutes, for example during a server restart, it shows “Lost connection to the server. Your workspace may still be finishing; retry to keep watching it.” In that case Retry resumes watching the same workspace instead of starting another one.

Note

Your workspace starts with demo data simulated from historic retail pricing. The activation screen notes that you’ll be notified when live pricing is ready.

If you monitor a brand, your generated catalog centres on the brands your company owns. It can also include rival brands’ product lines, which your tracked retailers sell and your own brand does not carry. Each retailer stocks its own share of your products at its own prices. This is what produces realistic pricing gaps to explore.

Your workspace is also seeded with sample MAP violations and sample Equivalent Matches. The number of MAP violations scales with your catalog and tracked retailers or competitors. Those features have data to explore as soon as you land in the workspace.

A welcome email is also sent to your account address when workspace generation completes.

Step 6: Enter your workspace

When generation completes, you reach the “Your market view is ready” screen. A Demo Environment badge confirms that the initial data is simulated. Below the title, the screen shows your site and perspective, for example the domain followed by “Brand workspace”, and the line “Dashboards are tailored to your priorities.” The screen summarises what the workspace offers:

• Track pricing across your retailers in the brand perspective, or across your competitors in the retailer perspective.
• Spot inconsistencies and risks instantly.
• Get alerts when prices change.

A footer line repeats that demo data is simulated from historic retail pricing.

Click Enter workspace to land on the Dashboard for your chosen perspective, brand or retailer. Pricing data and KPI cards are already populated. The button opens the workspace this setup created, even if you started another setup in the meantime.

After setup

In the app you can:

• Switch between the brand and retailer perspectives with the Brand/Retailer toggle in the app header. The toggle is available when it is enabled for your workspace.
• Invite teammates to your organization via Organizations & Members.
• Add or request more competitors and retailers on the Competitors & Retailers page.
• Set up alert rules to be notified of price changes on the Alerts page.
• Connect Slack or generate API keys under Integrations & API Keys.