The sales channels have increased for any business owing to digitization. There are various channels contributing to your sales. In such a scenario, it is important to be aware of your market position. As the competitive landscape is becoming fierce, it has become crucial to deliver the right retail strategy.With digitization, consumers now have more options than ever! For instance, a simple online search on the Smartphone enables them to compare the prices of the products they wish to buy with intricate details.
In today’s blog let us understand the various opportunities that product matching software can create for your business.
To begin with, it can be easily established that prospective consumers are already using a form of product matching for comparing prices. And so, it becomes essential for an e-commerce business to stay one step ahead of its competitors. Now, automation of the pricing decisions for margin and promotional strategies is already a much-needed part of the retail strategy. However, the competitive landscape should be accounted for so that a business doesn’t lose its sales conversions once the customers perform a quick search.
Product matching is a crucial part of price monitoring as well. Let’s have a look at what it is and why it is so significant for an eCommerce business.
What is Product Matching?
If you wish to create a brilliant retail strategy, product matching is the key! It is simply the process of finding a similar or the same product as yours in the competitive arena. However, it might not be quite easy or straight forward. Retailers might spend hours searching for the competitor websites manually ad might still lag behind. They might fail to see what consumers might see in their search on the web.
Did you know that an individual can manually match up to 80 images in an hour and it might take almost 16 hours for matching 1000 products? The same can be done via automation in just a few minutes! Now, isn’t that wonderful!
Importance of Product Matching for E-commerce
- Product matching can help a business in developing a rational pricing strategy and keep its business competitive.
- It can help them in making the products competitive as businesses compare the product prices on various platforms and learn more about their competitors.
- It helps a business in standing out from competitors. For example, if a seller provide a special offer on a table lamp with a table clock, it differentiates them from other sellers in the competitive landscape.
- Product matching comes in handy when a retailer wishes to make an offer.
- It helps in tracking consumer behavior and tendencies and learning from them.
- Product matching helps in understanding the assortment overlap. You must make sure that your catalog has the required differentiation while still being at par with the competitors.
- Product matching creates a single source for product data.
Challenges Faced By Companies While Product Matching
- One of the main challenges of product matching is non-uniform data which is messy mainly because of the diverse brand and manufacturer names on various websites.
- Yet another challenge is that websites lag behind when it comes to crucial product information.
- It is easy to match the model and UPC number but they are not available readily.
- It can be highly time consuming and cumbersome to manually match the products.
- The product features coverage is different on different sites.
- For multi-channel, understanding the in-store assortment or regional price trends is not practical.
- Many times, retailers try to do product matching by sending an individual to the store to inquire about what products the competitors are stocking on the shelves. However, it is not easy to scale and comes with limitations such as regional coverage. Some retailers make use of expensive resources internally for manually exploring the web category by category and matching the product manually in the spreadsheets. This can lead to inconsistency in the matching logic which can consume a lot of time. Saving this time can help in strategizing.
- Constant price change scan also pose a challenge while product matching. On average, the product prices on Amazon change every 10 minutes.However, most retailers don’t reprice their products frequently. Therefore,making decisions based on this stale data will already leave your business behind.
Product Matching Models
Usually, the product information on e-commerce platforms includes the title of the product, features, and images of the product. The product title is a brief text which explains information about a product.
The features of the product are usually listed as pointers or in a structured table. Stealing the image from a competitor might make it easy for the customer to find out similar options. But the approach also decreases the chances of customers paying attention to what you are offering.
Here’s a look at the product matching models:
1. Title Similarity
It is a model which works on comparing the offers by quantifying the similarity between the titles. Technology helps in detecting same titles even when the comparison differs significantly. The title for the same product might differ from one seller to another. Finding out the similar products is based on the model chosen by a retailer.
2. Price Comparison
Product similarity is figured out depending on the price comparison. For example, there is a wide array of similar products with almost the same pricing and one offer is different from the other. This might reflect that product is different. For finding out similar offers, price distribution is also evaluated. Products are displayed in the same range in case of any similarity.
3. Attribute Extraction
In this type of model, product match depends on the similarity of product categories. It can be item size, color, brand, model, condition, etc. Technology helps in measuring the level of difference between the products. If there is a low discrepancy, items are considered as same.
4. Image Similarity
Image similarity works the same as title similarity. For detecting the same products, quantifying image similarity is involved. One of the main challenges here occurs when there is a lack of labeled data points on the product. Also, the images of the same product might differ in color brightness, temperature, etc.
Now that you know the significance of product matching you can utilize it the right way for sustaining the competition.
Reach Your Potential with Product Matching
Product matching gets effective work done in no time. You can have a strong product design but without right direction, it can’t get the real results it deserves. PriceIntelGuru’s product matching software is the best for your company to beat the competition with an amazing product and a better product projection. Curious to know more, then Book a free demo today!
