In the world of e-commerce and digital retail, where countless transactions happen of millions of products across numerous platform. Tracking the competitors who are manufacturing or selling same or similar products as you is very difficult. But with grow tech and facility, product automatch is a key which can open the lock of this problem.  But what is product automatch? You must be wording.

Product automatch is a technology that automatically matched identical or similar products across different platforms or sources, AI and machine learning plays a central role in making the tool capable to understand the difference and similarities in a product from the one it is comparing with. It helps the business to stay competitive while keeping tracks of your competitors moves in real-time.

While product automatch tool comes with a bunch of advantages there are also some drawbacks which a business should know about, before they can decide if they wanted to use the tool or not.

In this article we will discuss about the most common merits and demerits of product automatch so business can find the balance between them and grow with the new tech in new speed.

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Merits of Product Automatch

Once you see a satin in the cloth you will never think it as clean, even when the stain is removed. Same happens with the perception of people, once they saw something bad its very hard for them to accept its goodness too. So to not let this human biased comes into the way of judging the effectiveness of the tool, we will discuss its advantages first.

1. Time Efficiency

Have you ever sat behind the screen for hours to fetch out every detail of the competitors who are selling the same products as yours or maintaining the list of a products with their information which are exact same or similar with yours? If you did, then you must know that it is one of most tedious as well  as time consuming task.

But with product automatch you or your precious resources don’t have to do that, the data which a person can collect in a day can be collect within few minutes with data efficiency. As manually comparing thousands of SKU’s (Stock Keeping Units) across multiple websites or databases is not only time-consuming but also prone to errors.

2. Increased Accuracy

Product automatch tools use latest technologies like machine learning and AI to analyze images, product title, product description and other attributes to increase the accuracy of the data. These algorithms can identify the similarities and difference far more finely than any human being can. This not only increases the chances of mismatch but also can provide the customer about the percentage of similarity and difference with accuracy.

3. Better Competitive Intelligence

With product automatch tool, businesses can pinpoint the exact same or similar products what their competitors are selling, their prices and other information in real-time. This kind of knowledge and intelligence helps the business to become flexible in its marketing as well as pricing strategies, as business will always be prepared for the changes in the market dynamics.

4. Scalability

As the business grows the range of your products also grows, and at the same time the difficulty to watch out the competitors products automatch and their pricing strategy also grows. But you don’t have to worry about the complications of expansion of your business if you use product automatch. It doesn’t matter if you have one product or one thousand products, you will get the data as accurate as every in just a tap.

5. Improved Decision-Making

The dataset backed by accurate product matches or accurate data allows the businesses to have better insight about pricing, assortment, promotions, and inventory strategies, and management ensures you are more capable of making the right decisions about your business.

In other words, the right data will most probably lead to the right decisions. Choose the tools that aren’t prone to human errors and provide accurate and real-time information about your products.

Check out Product Automatch for a better understanding.

6. Cost Efficiency

Automation is the best tool for repetitive tasks without frequent changes, and product automatch is one of those repetitive tasks for which you require a dedicated team if you haven’t automated it, and you spend a significant operational cost on your team. Well, the return on investment from deploying a product automatch tool often outweighs the initial cost of the software or service.

7. Enhanced User Experience

Product automatch is not only used in competitor tracking, but this technology is widely used in e-commerce platforms where they want the best user experience. The accurate the tool is, the better the prediction and even better the user experience, as your platform can show the most relevant alternative and comparison options for products similar to what you search. This enhances the user experience, improves their satisfaction and can also increase the conversion rates on your site.

Demerits of Product Auto-match

Now that we have seen all the good sides of the tool, it’s also fair to see what could be the problems or disadvantages a business can face while implementing the product, automatch tool or using it too much.

1. False Positives and Negatives

Despite the rapid advancement of technology, no algorithm is perfect. There is one or the other loophole that everyone and everything. Product automatch tool is not loophole-proof either, sometimes it also give false positives, which means matching products that are not actually the same, or false negatives which means to match products that are exactly same. These errors and inaccuracies can make the data irrelevant and can sometimes leads to wrong decision due to corrupted data which can cause lost of revenue and sometimes customers too.

2. Dependency on Data Quality

While product automatch is one of the revolutionary tool, there are some thing on which it’s response depends to a very large extend. If we say in simple words than the response of product automatch tool depends highly on the quality and structure of data you provide into it. Inconsistent naming conventions, mission product attributes, bad quality of product image,

While product automatch is one of the revolutionary tool, there are some thing on which it’s response depends to a very large extend. If we say in simple words than the response of product automatch tool depends highly on the quality and structure of data you provide into it. Inconsistent naming conventions, mission product attributes, bad quality of product image, or outdated information can confuse the tool and the algorithm and result in incorrect match.

3. Complex Integration

We all consider that product automatch can help any business in growth to a very large extend but a business will able to avail the product and it’s advantages when the business can implement it. The process of implementation of product automatch if very complex, different internal softwares have different ways to integrate to a tool, so business can struggle with the integration of product automatch tools with existing systems like ERP, PIM or CMS , because of which business mostly needs to appoint an external resource, which not only cost a bit but also delays in the implementation of the tool.

4. Limited Contextual Understanding

While AI is very helpful but it still struggles with the contextual nuances. If we understand this drawback the help of an example, then let’s assume there are two identical smartphones which may have slight variation in accessories or reginoal models. An product automatch tool most probably will fail to account for these minor but important differences leading to incorrect data.

5. Ongoing Maintenance Required

Setting up of tool is not only the technical step a business for effective result of product automatch but the system requires regular updates, retraining of algorithms from time to time and monitoring to ensure the accuracy of the data as the product catalogue of every business evolves and new competitors data is added in daily basis. This never ending maintenance can be resource intensive and in some cases can be expensive too.

6. Over-reliance on Automation

AI and Machine learning based tool are reliable but not to the extend that human don’t even oversight it. The ignorance from the side of human or relying solely on the automated tools can proved to be risky as businesses may miss subtle yet important product difference or difference in the behavior of customer that machines may not be able to detect or will not consider important, which can lead to flawed pricing or assortment strategies.

Conclusion

There is no doubt that product automatch is a powerful tool that offers multiple benefits, saves time, is can bend with the expansion of the business to enhance the market competitiveness. However, like every technology, product automatch also comes with set of drawbacks or challenges such as data dependency, occasional inaccuracy in data or mismatch of the products, and setting up complexities.

The key to maximizing the product automatch’s potential is in using it as a support mechanism other than replaces the human resources from automation tool completely. By going through the merits and demerits of product automatch, businesses can evaluate correctly if and how to incorporate the tool into their business and how to use it’s pricing and competitive intelligence in the business, while smartly avoiding all the growth blocks which can occur if you use the tool impulsively.

I hope this article will be knowledgable and insightful for you, if you wanted to know about product automatch in detail please check out our Product Automatch article.