Product matching
Product Matching
Before we start monitoring your competitors’ prices, we have to match your products to those of your competitors. This means finding the equivalent product on your competitors’ websites and linking them with your corresponding product within Price2Spy. Depending on your needs we offer three product matching solutions.
Automatch
- Completely automated product matching process
- Applicable in industries that use unique product identifiers
- Performed continuously
- Set-up per website
- Can be used only for matching identical products
- 99.5% matching accuracy
Manual Matching
- Applicable in all industries, regardless of unique product codes are used or not
- Performed one-off and can be performed repeatedly upon your request
- Charged per combination (1 product on 1 site)
- Can be used for matching look-a-like products
- Ideal for a small number of products and a large number of websites
- 99.8% matching accuracy
Hybrid Matching
- Semi-automated process relying on matches based on Machine Learning, reviewed and approved by humans
- Applicable in almost in all industries, regardless of unique product codes are used or not
- Performed continuously or one-off
- Set-up per website
- Can be used only for matching identical products
- 99.8% matching accuracy
Website discovery service
Don’t know who your competitors are? Afraid that a new competitor might appear and you may not know about it? We can make that worry go away with our Website discover service.
Automatch - continuous automated product matching
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.
Who is Automatch for?
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.
How does Automatch work?
All existing products in your account that still don’t have matching URLs on particular competitor sites are attempted to be matched – automatically.
Besides that, Automatch can work continuously to try to find new matches (this is optional). This Automatch functionality is especially useful for everyone who is monitoring marketplaces such as eBay or other sites with multiple individual listings.
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:
- Searchable product data on a particular competitor site (eg. some sites may provide EAN/UPC search, some 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
Still not sure?
Here are two additional Automatch functionalities that set it apart:
Repeated execution (optional)
It is possible that at the time of performing Automatch a particular product is not found on the competitor’s website. However, after a while, the competitor may include it in their offering. Without enabling repeated execution of Automatch, this change can go under the radar. Enabling this Automatch functionality will ensure you don’t miss such cases.
Cost-efficiency
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.
Manual product matching
How does Manual product matching work?
Each of your products will be checked on your competitors’ sites, and manually matched with yours. The result is a human-made, nonsense-free, high quality list of matches, whose reliability is much higher than what you get from price comparison engines (like Google Shopping and others). When performing product matching, our team will check not only product names, but also technical specs and product images – in order to ensure that a match is indeed a proper one.
Who is Manual product matching for?
If you want to save time and have a large number of competitor websites you want to monitor and a small list of products Manual product matching is an ideal option for you.
What we would need from you is a list of products you would like added to Price2Spy, followed by a list of your competitors. Our task will be setting up all these products in your Price2Spy account, so you get notified of any price changes detected from that moment on.
Advantages of Manual product matching
Besides saving time & resources, here’s a couple of more things our Manual matching team offers:
Matching in any language
Our product matching team has the ability to perform matching in any language – so far we had tasks not only in English but languages like German, Spanish, Arabic, Swedish, Japanese, Portuguese, Russian etc.
Experience across industries
As for the industries – since we founded Price2Spy we have performed matching in more than 25 different industries – the most recent one being rental properties (where matching is especially difficult because it involved matching of apartments / rental properties – which is by no means an easy task).
Hybrid product matching (via Machine Learning)
What does Hybrid mean?
Hybrid means that machines and humans are working together. Put it simply: Machine Learning (ML) algorithm will go through products from both your and competitor sites and make sure that only meaningful matching candidates get suggested. However, it will be humans who will be doing the final check – whether that candidate is really a good match or not.
The result is a process where matching accuracy is very close to 100% – ensured by the human effort. However, the amount of such human work is much much less than if product matching was done with no ML help.
Who is Hybrid product matching for?
If your products are of such nature that they cannot be effectively matched by unique identifiers (no EANs, UPCs, MPNs, etc), and there is a need for manual matching as a continual process – you should consider Hybrid Automatch via Machine Learning – part of Price2Spy Enterprise package.
Learn more about Hybrid product matching
Product matching via ML was a project which took us 18 months of development in cutting-edge technologies. The problem is very complex, no other service (and there are many of them operating worldwide) offers such a feature. That is why we have prepared a series of blog posts explaining in detail why we went for such a project, and how we pulled it off.
- Product matching via Machine Learning – Abstract
- (Part #1) Product m via Machine Learning – Introduction to the project
- (Part #2) Product matching via Machine Learning – Important decisions to be made
- (Part #3) For ML experts – why is product matching so difficult
- (Part #4) Preparing the ML training set
- (Part #5) ML training Implementation
Website discovery service
What is Website discovery service?
Our Website discovery service is our way of finding websites that can be considered your competitors or that are potentially selling your brand’s products without you knowing.
These websites can be completely new or have simply gone “under the radar” during this time.
With this service, we help you deal with the worry of being aware of new competing websites appearing.
Who is this service for?
We believe that you know very well which websites we should monitor for you. However, from time to time we encounter cases where that’s simply not possible because new websites keep appearing.
If that’s the case in your industry then our Website discovery service is exactly what you need. It can be used in both cases of new competitor websites or new retail websites selling the products your brand manufactures.
How does it work?
The way the Website discovery service works is the following. We’d periodically check if there are new websites selling your products. The period depends on you and can be anything from 1 week to several months. You can also specify if we should check all sites worldwide, or if we should focus only on specific markets.
Once we find new websites, we won’t start monitoring them automatically. Instead, we’d provide you with a list of new websites and wait for your approval.
Once you have approved all the relevant websites, we’d start with the product matching process. This process is applicable for all three types of product matching – Automatch, Manual, and Hybrid product matching.
One special case of website discovery would be the discovery of new sellers on marketplaces like Amazon. It works the same way as website discovery, but this time we won’t be returning a list of newly found websites, but newly found sellers instead.