
In the fast-paced digital transformation era, the eCommerce sector is gaining more and more importance. There are more than 25 million online stores across the globe, and this number is increasing daily. It is anticipated that by the end of 2025, total sales of this popular sector will be more than $7.5 trillion, with a surge of more than 50% from today.
Due to immense growth and ample opportunities, this sector is becoming more competitive daily. Every eCommerce business needs to set itself apart to survive and stay competitive by delivering something innovative to its customers. Making products visible to users is the core ingredient for every online product-selling business. Matching the product significantly increases sales and improves the customer’s shopping experience. This blog will explore the product matching method and how its automation can support eCommerce platforms to sell more.
What is Product Matching?
Product matching is the process of comparing the same products sold by various sellers on single or multiple eCommerce platforms with a single search query result. With the help of deep learning and ML algorithms, product sellers can identify similar products to compare the product price, details, quality, meta, title, offers, discounts, and more.
This data helps identify product gaps and allows for optimizing product details. Product matching helps to classify items in such a manner that helps to enhance the customer's shopping experience. Nowadays, customers always visit multiple platforms before buying products to get better deals. Matching the product and making it competitive will help to retain and gain new consumers.
How is Product Matching Beneficial for Buyers and Sellers?
Automatic product matching delivers excellent benefits to both sellers and buyers. It helps to improve the customer shopping experience by providing them with precise product information along with better options to choose from.
Buyers can see and compare multiple options from different sellers before selecting the best deal. For example, if a buyer wants to purchase a pen drive and search for the same. The result shows two sellers are selling it for $20, and another one is selling the same product at $2,2, along with an extended warranty of 6 months. Buyers can choose the available options according to their preferences. Going with the lower-price option, it is also possible to compare the details of the selling companies, such as reviews, specifications of the product, shipping charges, return policies, and more, before making a purchase decision.
Product sellers can match and compare product prices with market competitors to optimize prices and give better deals to potential buyers. By identifying competitors' strategies, businesses can develop better marketing strategies, create better offers and discounts, provide complete product details, and more.
How Product Matching Works?
Automated product matching collects all the vital information related to products from different online sources and processes to get the desired comparison outcomes.
Product Profile Data
The product matching process gathers and combines complete product details from various marketplaces. This data helps create precise product reports that fill in missing information or remove errors in the product listing.
Accurate Product Attributes
AI-powered product matching lets businesses allocate precise product attributes. This automated process aids in defining better product categories and makes searching easy for consumers.
Product Semantics and Context
Semantic matching is the process of identifying complex and unstructured product details. These details help buyers understand the overall product and how it can help them daily.
Classification and Categorization
Product matching uses contextual details to define the class and category of the related products.
Product Similarity
Clean product details, standards, and classification make matching a product with identical or similar products easy. Unique codes and various combinations showcase identical products.
Benefits of Automated Product Matching
Automated product matching delivers ample benefits to businesses, which helps increase overall business growth, customer satisfaction, and competitive advantage in the sector. Let us see the essential benefits of product matching.
Increase Product Sales with Personalization
This method of product representation improves the purchasing experience and encourages buyers to make additional purchases. Customization contributes to a higher order value overall. Buyers also become repeat customers because they believe the supplier appropriately reflects their needs.
Stay Ahead in the Market Competition
Product matching with competitive intelligence helps analyze and understand competitors' actions. Accurate product matching data helps improve pricing planning, build marketing tactics, improve the supply chain, maintain inventory levels, and identify new business opportunities. Businesses can make data-driven decisions to match current demands and satisfy customer needs, resulting in success in a competitive sector.
Better Visibility of the Product Listings
Product matching can be an excellent tool for identifying top-performing product listings from multiple stores. Businesses can obtain key information such as product titles, descriptions, keywords, prices, ratings, and more by analyzing these results. Companies can optimize their product listings and increase ranking and visibility, increasing traffic and product sales.
Effective Inventory Management
Product sales on several online marketplaces necessitate efficient inventory control. To ascertain inventory levels, automatic product matching assists in locating comparable products across several domains. This information aids in preventing out-of-stock situations and maintaining stock levels during the busiest time of year.
Avoid Copyright Breach
Copyright violation is a significant worry in the online marketplace. Automated product matching quickly identifies if there is any replica of your product designs, infringement of copyright, or any negative representation by competitors. Knowing the result will allow businesses to protect their products and ensure consumers buy the correct and original products.
Make Product Price Competitive
Automated product matching is an excellent way to optimize product prices based on market trends and rival tactics. To remain competitive, businesses can adjust their product prices by receiving real-time price change alerts.
Real-Time Data Acquisition
Product matching can be a great solution for obtaining varied product data in real time. This data will help strategize various business operations and provide buyers with a great shopping experience.
Better Single Product View and Classification
Sellers can easily distinguish various product categories and add missing SKUs, which helps them better manage inventory. Automatic product matching will assist in classifying products according to industry standards (UNSPSC) to create better hierarchies.
Product Matching Models
Product matching models are solutions developed to make product comparisons with the help of various datasets and information collected from different domains. Below are the vital product-matching models.
Similar Product Titles
With this model, eCommerce businesses can compare and match selling product titles. Automatic product matching uses ML algorithms to identify titles that look similar. For example, if a business sells yoga mats, look at how similar titles can be.
- Yoga Mat
- Soft Yoga Mat
- ABC Yoga Mat
- Yoga Mat Blue
Here, the titles for the same product are different. Machine Learning models apply matching algorithms to identify similarities in the titles in the search results.
Price Similarity
This model helps match similar products with identical prices. Products are placed together in one group, allowing businesses to analyze them accurately.
Product Attribute Mining
Extracting various product features such as dimension, color, brand, shape, size, and more assures that the match is the exact one. Here, the automatic product matching process relies on data analysis algorithms to find differences between compared products. The lower the differences, the more similar the products are.
Similar Images
Automatic product matching also utilizes product images to find the matching products. This process is helpful when other details, such as title and description, are not similar. Advanced algorithms are essential in comparing images to find matching products accurately.
Steps to Implement Successful Product Matching Method
Adopt Best Solution
Multiple product matching solutions are available to explore and select, and they range from free to paid. Knowing that the matching process is very important, businesses must adopt the best suitable solutions according to their needs and ease of use.
Integration with Store
Once done with the solution selection, businesses need to follow the instructions given by the service provider to integrate it with online stores. To run the database integration process smoothly, all the required plug-ins must be installed, and the provided APIs must be appropriately utilized.
Product Listing Optimization
In the dynamic eCommerce sector, highly optimized product details are essential. High-resolution images also play a crucial role in the product-matching process.
Implement the model
Once the product is optimized accurately, connect each product with the adopted solutions.
Monitor and Analyze the Data
Once the process starts running, it is mandatory to monitor the process’s effect timely over the product’s online visibility, click through rate, and conversion ratio. This information plays a crucial role in enhancing the listings across the platforms.
Conclusion
By knowing how much automated product matching is nowadays, eCommerce businesses should adopt this mechanism as early as possible to gain unmatched business growth. Product matching enhances visibility online, increases sales, improves customer experience, identifies market demands, and gives businesses a competitive edge. We at RetailGators collect and provide precise product-matching data using AI-driven tools and technologies. Identify similar products in the market, build effective business plans, know market demands, and serve your customers in a significant manner.
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