SunTec India's Product Matching Services Help a Competitor Pricing Intelligence Tool Work Optimally with Human Quality Assurance

Customer Profile

Industry: Retail
Vertical: Subscription-Based Competition Intelligence Service
Business Model: Predominantly Online

Employing a blend of proprietary technology and smart talent, our client delivers real-time competition intelligence, smarter price monitoring and optimal product assortment to online-only retailers, multi-channel merchants and manufacturers around the world, helping them improve their online performance. The client gathers competitors' information directly from websites and other digital sources, then with the help of product data analysts verifies and validates for further use in a range of marketing applications and business decision making process.

Operating in a wide variety of categories and multiple currencies, the client has hundreds of clients in over 30 different countries.

A constant challenge in reliably matching products or SKUs is the absence of a unique product identifier, which can be universally applied by eCommerce merchants. The competitor price monitoring software of the client could match uniform or product information as in Exact Matches or Like for like (LFL) Matches. However, matching product information that is not systematically aligned with that of the competition left blind spots and discrepancies in the intelligence gathered, right from identifying the right competitors, their inventory to determining the prices of exact and similar matched products on their website.

The client selected SunTec to address their pain areas in price intelligence gathering based on the company's proven track record of delivering mission-critical ecommerce data support services for 25+ years, superior match rates, data accuracy, team's responsiveness and fast turn-around-time.

To precisely determine identical products, the eCommerce catalog management specialists at SunTec matched the client's product list with millions of products on several hundred competing retail websites and product search engines (like Google Shopping, PriceGrabber and others). Once an automated matching was performed, products were manually matched on competitors' sites to obtain reliable, high quality list of matches.

• Product brand and title
• Product attributes like colour, design, etc., with exact or close match, or with minor variation
• Standard codes EAN, UPC Code, etc. (excluding items that do not have UPC code like apparel and jewelry, etc.).
• Different promotional offers, package deals, paired items, etc.

For example:

• Listing on the client's store: Notebook - X35 8GB RAM 13" LED
• Listing on the competitor's store: 13" X35 Notebook 8GB RAM 500GB HD

Within two weeks, the product matching team at SunTec could match 3,000 SKUs, complete with Private Label and "Like" Product Matches, across multiple sites and catalogs, delivering accurate, streamlined data for client's competitor price intelligence services.