Product matching, to be honest, is a relatively new thing. It started approximately 15 years ago (so, in late 2000’s) when first online pricing / assortment services appeared on the market.
From very early days, it became clear that monitoring prices of competitor products makes very little sense if you cannot compare these prices to prices of your own products.
Something essential was missing – and that was the link between the two products – and that’s what we today call product matching. Let’s see how the pioneers in this business tackled the problem, and how product matching evolved through years.
Early days (2009-2011): performing product matching inhouse
The most simple scenario goes like this: if an E-commerce company needed to match products on it’s competitor’s site – it tasked it’s category managers to do it, one product at a time. The timeframe usually wasn’t well defined, as product matching was considered a low-priority task (compared to other operational things like taking care of customer complaints, late vendor deliveries etc). That’s why product matching was considered as filler-task from the very beginning, which made it very unpopular with category managers.
Ecommerce companies who were accepting internships seized the opportunity – so product matching tasks went to youngsters (making it even more unpopular).
One thing was positive, though: in cases when experienced category managers performed product matching, the danger of matching a wrong product was very low, as category managers knew these products very well, making sure that they were comparing apples to apples.
For ones who never tried it themselves – product matching is a rather dull work. Basically, you need to take product A from your list (the lists were usually prioritized by sales order – so products that were selling better were matched first), then go to Website of Competitor X, perform a search there (you need to be smart about the search string, though) – and then filter through dozens (and in some cases hundreds of results) – finding the correct match. Once you find the matching candidate, you need to check it’s product specs, the title, the description, and of course the product image. Once you’re done – if the match is there, you fill in the URL of matched product in your original list; or – if the matching product has not been found, you move on to the next Competitor (Y), where the whole process gets repeated. Once you’ve been through all of competitors, you move on to the next product (product B). And so on, day in, day out.
No wonder that no one wanted to do such an intense, dull and repetitive task. Let alone the energy drain – as category managers who had been intensely working on product matching had very little energy left for their main field of work – commercial activities, sourcing products, creativity, finding new vendors etc.
Many of them got fed up with it, and chose to continue their career elsewhere (remember, in these days E-commerce was booming, so it was very easy to switch jobs).
This is where the management stepped in. The decision-makers have finally figured out that product matching need not be done by someone whose rate is so expensive, who could leave the company so easily and who is so hard to replace. A more cost-efficient solution was needed. And soon enough, new vendors sensed this and stepped in, offering brand new kind of service, which never existed before. In our next post we will cover the next period in product matching evolution (2011-2013) – when first vendors started appearing on the market. Stay tuned 😊
>>> Part 2: Product Matching History (2012 – 2015)