As an eCommerce manager who needs to keep track of competitor’s prices and/or assortment, you might ask yourself – do I need product matching as a continual process, or just as a one-off task? If it’s going to be a continual process, does it need to be continual on daily basis? If not, what product-matching frequency should I choose?
For those who are short on time – I’ll spare you the reading: the answer is: if your budget permits, your product matching should be a continual process. If you cannot make it fully continual – then by all means, try to keep it on at least 3 months frequency.
For those who can spare few more minutes – here is a more detailed explanation, based on analyzing your business needs vs market landscape.
Online retailers
Online retailers typically work with dozens, if not hundreds of different brands. All of these brands periodically add new / discontinue old products. This means, that if you want to be diligent about your product assortment, you need to constantly add more and more products to your store. And of course, if you want to compare your products (usually we’re talking about price comparison) you would need to find matching product on competitor’s website.
Therefore, a continuous process is recommended. However, since daily continuity can be a strain (both on the budget and the operations), 3 months is the most advisable cycle for product matching.
Please note that in this 3 month’s cycle, you should not only try to match new products against existing competitors – but you should also investigate if there are new competitors out there. This can be either achieved by talking to your vendors (if there is somebody new on the market, and that someone is considered important – it will most likely pop up in your conversation), or by performing Web search (you should use tools which can estimate website traffic – so you take into account only the ones with high traffic levels)
Brands
Online presence is today one of top priority for brands of all industries. Unlike retailers, brands have longer product launch cycles. Product development is a lengthy process, also the launch planning needs to care of seasonality and other market specifics. Therefore, brands usually work in longer cycles – which depend on the nature of such brand – but we’re usually talking about 6 or 12 months cycles. For example – fashion brands always work with 6-months cycles (spring collection / autumn collection).
This cycle also dictates the need for product matching – usually a new product matching task kicks off 1 month after the new product line has been launched (so it gives enough time to retailers to add new products to their listing)
Market dynamics
As mentioned above, you should not forget that there will be new competitors out there, and if they are relevant enough, you should cover them in your product matching. In case of very fragmented markets, with hundreds of competing retailers – this can lead to significant costs – that’s why we recommend careful market analysis – to determine which competitors deserve to be monitored (and their products matched) – others can be ignored until they become more successful.
The dangers of neglecting product matching
Today’s markets are anything but static. If you do not match new products (or if you ignore new competitors), you won’t be able to compare your offer with theirs, nor you will be able to compare your prices with their prices. This will inevitably lead to losing ground – both with revenue and the profits.
That is why strongly recommend product matching as a continuous process – or, to be more precise, a process which should be executed each 3 months (or 6 months, in case of brands). Lets get started today!