Product matching is the use of machine learning to identify similar products from different data sources. Product matching can be beneficial to both manufacturers and retailers. 

Manufacturers can do a complete analysis of their products with their competitors’ products to have a competitive advantage. Giant retailers such as Amazon or Walmart can use the product matching algorithm to match their existing products with new products being listed on their platform.

Product matching is highly advantageous for an e-commerce setup as well. E-commerce businesses mostly have a variety of products under one website/category. Product matching can help them show similar products to customers, making it easy for them to choose which product to buy. 

Product Matching in Ecommerce

Online shopping has become huge in recent years, especially after the Covid-19 breakout. It has become essential for e-commerce businesses to offer the right products at the right prices to potential buyers.

Product matching can help in this regard. It can help businesses identify similar products in their catalog vs their competitors’ catalogs based on titles, photos, descriptions, prices, and attributes. It is beneficial because it utilizes machine learning to get the results. Traditional methods to identify similar products were based on manual searches of titles, model numbers, and product attributes. 

Although these methods were effective in the past, they are not suitable for today’s fast-paced business models. E-commerce businesses can use different product matching tools to identify how they are marketing the products vs. their competitors, how they have priced their products, and where they lack in their strategy.

If you are a business owner and are looking for ways to improve your sales, product matching can help you in this regard. Here are the ten ways you can use product matching tools to boost your sales:

1. Competitive Pricing

One of the major factors in online shopping has always been the price. It is considerably easy for a consumer to do a price comparison when shopping online. Tons of websites offer similar products and are priced very differently on different platforms. 

The window of making a sale in an online environment is very short. To make the best use of that, you need to set your prices competitively. Product matching technology allows the customer to compare your prices with your competitors and pick the better option.

2. Automate Pricing Analysis

Setting a price at the market average is just one factor in improving your sales. Your competitors may decide to lower their prices at some point. You can’t keep track of all the price changes made by the competitors if you have to do it manually. 

Many products matching tools offer automation of the price analysis and provide a market average. By setting up an automated price analysis, you can always have a competitive advantage in the costing department.

3. Improving Product Titles

Product titles are like gateways. People reach their desired products through titles and keywords.

You might wonder why one of your products has low sales while your competitor is selling the same product well. The reason might be the title. It may not be as much effective as your competitor’s title. 

With deep learning, you can extract all the selling titles of your competitors and choose the appropriate title for your products. It can not only help you boost sales but can also help you identify relevant keywords for your product.

4. Improving Product Descriptions and Attributes

Descriptions help the customer’s decision-making process. A customer might reach your product through the title, but a description is what closes and deal and helps customers decide whether to purchase or not.

Listings with a poor write-up or without key attributes are less likely to sell compared to the listings with good product descriptions that lists all attributes of the product. The machine learning algorithm can compare different descriptions of the same/similar products and can help you identify missing characteristics and features. Using all the features and attributes in the description increases the customer’s intention to buy your product. 

5. Organizing Product Listings

Showing similar products in your catalog in a single place to your customers increases the chances of sales. Product matching can help you organize your product listings according to their similarity and makes the user experience more enjoyable and productive. It makes it easy for customers to choose the best product according to their needs without jumping from website to website.

6. Making Additional Product Recommendations

An effective way to improve sales is by recommending additional products to your customers. For instance, if a customer has bought a TV remote from you, you can recommend buying batteries with the remote. There are high chances that the customer will also buy the relevant product from you. This way, you can enhance your sales without any extra marketing cost.

Product matching can make this process automated by making relevant product suggestions to customers that bought one of your products.

7. Eliminate Copyright Infringement

Copyright infringement is something that is not to be compromised. You may have worked so hard on making the best product designs and optimizing the listings as much as possible, but some competitors can just steal your design and make a similar product without much effort. It can not only decrease your chances of making the sale but can also ruin your brand identity.

A deep-learning algorithm can compare products from different competitors and identify if someone has stolen your design. You can take immediate action to keep your competitive advantage and your sales.

8. Optimizing Inventory

Duplication of products is a very common problem for large retailers. Keeping track of thousands or even hundreds of products is difficult, especially if you have multiple new products coming in every shipment. It is essential for businesses to set up a system that removes the issue of product duplication.

Because product management can automate this process, keeping track of the products and removing product duplication is very easy. It can help businesses to eliminate high overstocking costs and also increase revenue.

Conclusion

Increasing sales is the core of all businesses. Companies make all the efforts to increase their sales even if it means putting hundreds of millions of dollars into marketing costs. With the boom of e-commerce, companies must keep finding ways to improve their sales. One easy way to improve sales is by using product matching. It can help companies identify similar products in their catalog vs their competitors’ catalogs. It can also help them price their products competitively, optimize their product listings, and also make relevant product suggestions to their customers.