Who should use product matching services

Companies who perform competitive price intelligence, price monitoring, assortment monitoring or repricing services also need product matching as a very first step of price comparison process. Many such companies do offer some flavours of product matching themselves (including old-fashioned manual product matching) – but are welcome to use our API services for the methods which they cannot handle themselves

• API-based product matching, fully automated service which calculates matching probability, based on product name, image, description, price and URL.

Typically, our cooperation with such clients is not a one-off, but rather a continual process.

Such companies use Product Matching AI API in order to establish seamless integration between the two IT systems, This method also ensures that their end clients do not know that the service was provided by a third party (being Product Matching AI) – enabling our clients to charge their own clients according to their own fee structure.

One of brand’s managers most important tasks is preserving the brand image on the market (that image is in most cases associated with the product’s price) and to prevent retailers fighting each other over that price, especially on premium brand exclusives. In order to do so, brands need to monitor market development, and pricing behaviour of their retailers – and product matching comes as first step in the monitoring process.

Again, classic product matching mechanisms are usually sufficient for brands who do not deal with a multitude of products, but what about cases where a brand deals with tens, or even hundreds of thousands different products (usually different part numbers). Again, This is where our API-based product matching comes in.

In case you have clients who are either retail companies of brands, who need help with Web scraping, and who want to compare and monitor products – product matching software, is something that can’t be avoided. Ensuring customer loyalty is becoming a task whose not only importance, but also difficulty is increasing year by year. Pricing strategies (and pricing decisions) of such ecommerce companies are often defined and implemented with help of digital agencies. All competitive pricing intelligence principles listed for retailers and brands are also applicable here.

The right type of product matching service you need would be determined by your client’s needs, but in cases where your clients deal with huge number of products, we recommend our API-based product matching service.

Modern buyers are very savvy – and before making the purchase, they will make sure that they got the best possible deal. This means they will find the desired product (either using price comparison websites, or by performing a search of their own). Actually, this means that the buyer will perform product matching of his own.

As a retailer (or as a brand who needs to monitor behaviour of it’s retailers) you need, as a part of pricing strategy implementation, to perform this product matching process yourself, in order to be able to compare your own prices to your own competitors and for monitoring competitor price changes.

Again, data comes as essential ingredient: if you price-match your product to competitors, you cannot allow to base your pricing decision on a wrongly matched product.

Never underestimate the importance of product matching accuracy.

Quite often retail companies ask themselves if their product offer matches the offer of their competitor websites. Although the perception is that all retailers offer the same product gamma, the stats say something different – typically not more than 25%-35% of product assortment is shared.

This gap is actually an opportunity – for a retailer who identifies the products that are missing in the offer- to broaden their product offering, and to bridge the gap to a competitor. And in order to do this analysis, you would need to

• Periodically scan products (perform data extraction) on competitor website, and
• Perform product matching against your own products – this is where Product Matching AI comes in. Some product matching solutions offer manual product matching – which Product Matching AI has improved by intense use of machine learning algorithms

Data quality is of essence in such product data extraction (web scraping) process: having incomplete, or inaccurate product matching data can lead to very bad assortment decisions and competitive insights, which will jeopardize your sales results. Product matching accuracy is a must, no doubt.

Whenever a brand needs to launch a new product (or: to launch an existing product on a new market), it first needs to understand the pricing behaviour of it’s competitors on that market.

That is why product matching software comes as a necessity, first practical step in this process.

Sometimes it’s not enough to monitor own product prices on a particular market. There are cases where it’s equally important to monitor prices of competitor brands and their products, since they can also influence how market perceives your product.