Relations/ Product Matching

Product Overview

In this module, you can see all of the products with their images:

You can search for a specific product, see the total number of products, decide the way you want to order the products etc.

If you click on the filter icon, you will see a window pop up, which will give you a way to filter the products that you want to see:

You can also click on a product and there will appear a new window with some additional data:

Don’t worry about the right side of the screenshot, it will be explained in the next module 😁

Relations

1. Competitor Relations

As we already mentioned, we offer our client the possibility to decide on the prices of their products while having insight on the prices for the same/similar products of their competitors.

This is possible by matching products with the same EAN Codes or manually matching some products that are the same/similar. Whenever two products are matched, we say that there is a new relation. After we add relations to a product, the product window will look like this:

2. Internal Relations

The same logic applied to competitor prices on the previous section, should also be applied between similar products of our clients. So, if our client is selling an Ice Cream of 2 different flavors, we enable them to create an Internal Relation between them, in order to manage the prices of both products simultaneously. They can also change the Index Factor if they think that one of them should be a bit more expensive or cheaper, and whenever the price of one product is changed, the other product’s price will then be changed by the same ratio.

3. Multipack Relations

Similar to Internal Relations, there are products that our clients sell in packs, and they should be priced accordingly. If our client is selling 6-packs of beer, the price of the pack should be the same or lower than the price of the same beer can x 6, otherwise it wouldn’t make sense for the customer to buy the whole pack when they can just buy 6 cans at a lower price.

Relation Approval Flows

Our tool is meant to be used by people with different positions and different accesses, and since creating a relation may have other implications (which will be explained during the documentation), some users don’t have access to create a relation. However, they can still suggest/propose a new relation depending on their access. The proposed/suggested relations can then be approved or declined by other users. This can all be seen on the Competitor Relation Approval or Internal Relation Approval screen.

Product Matching

As we mentioned a bit earlier, we can create Competitor Relations by EAN Matching or manually matching the products. While the statement is true, the manual matching is a lot simpler than one might imagine, this is because we facilitate the process through our Product Matching Module.

In the Product Matching Module you can see the products of our client, and then suggestions of similar products from their competitors. We achieve this by text-mining algorithms, by finding the longest continuous string of text from the article name/brand, and then also comparing other data that we may have on the products, such as size, weight, color etc. This way they can go through the products much faster and just choose the right one instead of having to search for it.

In the screenshot below you may see suggestions for one product:

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Match Rate Monitoring

The Match Rate Monitoring also serves as a Relation Home Page, in this module we can see some general statistics on the number of matches between products. The graphs there are designed to show the match rate development on a weekly basis, the match percentage with each competitor, the match percentage for each category and the number of products and revenue.