Automatch – continuous automated product matching
In case your industry uses highly standardized product identifiers like EANs, MPNs, UPCs, or ASINs, and if you need more than 1000 products matched this way, Automatch is the way to go.
What is Automatch?
Automatch is a continual automated product matching process that can be performed at specified intervals (daily, weekly, monthly), depending on your needs.
Depending on the match approval procedure (which is configurable to be fully automated, manual, or hybrid) products that get matched end up in your Price2Spy account, where they get regularly monitored for price changes.
How does Automatch work?
Automatch works in the following way: all existing products in the client’s account that still don’t have matching URLs on particular competitor sites are attempted to be matched – automatically.
In other words (for our clients who are already familiar with the Price Matrix report): Automatch will automatically try to fill in blank cells in the Price Matrix.
The matching is performed according to a set of matching rules, which we define together with our clients. The rules take the following into account:
-
- product data searchable on a particular competitor site (for example; some sites may provide EAN/UPC search, others may not);
- variations in product naming (example: ‘Galaxy S5 Silver’ vs ‘Galaxy S5 Gray’;
- matching accuracy (determined by several factors, for example, linguistic proximity);
- the need for a manual check on matching accuracy: the matches can be considered safe enough to be automatically approved, or they would need manual approval.
Why Automatch?
- Executed continually
-
- With manual product matching, we have learned from our clients’ experience that they quite often face a situation that particular products are not found on a competitor site at the time the initial product matching was performed. However, after some time, a competitor does include it in its offer, but Price2Spy does not know about it – and hence it does not monitor its price;
-
- On the other hand, Automatch will keep trying until it finds the product on the competitor site.
- Matching efficiency/costs
-
- The costs of manual product matching tend to get too high once we speak of 10 000 products or more;
- Furthermore, the time needed to perform the matching is often too long (weeks, if not months);
- This is where Automatch kicks in, within a few days you’ll have up-to-date matching data. Additionally, cost-effectiveness gets better and better as the number of products to be matched goes up.
Please check more details on our Automatch page.