Overview
Our Price Intelligence solution allows you to manually match online product listings from competitors with your catalog items, one by one at a product level or in bulk (which is the focus of this article).
There are two primary use cases for this feature:
To add listings you’ve gathered yourself and consider like-matches to your products.
To add competitive product matches from e-commerce websites where it’s unfeasible to automate the matching process. E.g., from a website that doesn’t display important product identifiers.
Both are meant to increase the competitive pricing landscape visibility for better and more profitable pricing decisions.
When bulk importing matches, it’s essential to understand the process and the validations our system performs to ensure accuracy and effectiveness. Check out the next sessions for a quick step-by-step process.
This feature is only available to users with administrator role.
Step 1 - Prepare your import file
Your file must include columns for your SKU, the competitor URL, and the match type. Make sure all fields are filled out correctly, following the required format:
The accepted file format is CSV.
The file needs to have these 3 required columns: sku | url | match_type
sku: Inform the SKU code of the product that should receive the competitor product match.
url: Provide the URL of the competitor product listings page.
match_type: Specify whether this is an exact or equivalent match. The accepted values are 'exact' and ‘equivalent' in lowercase.
All column names must be in lowercase.
Download this template file for a quick start.
Step 2 - Upload your file
Use our dedicated platform interface to upload the file. Navigate to the ‘Match Import’ page under Settings and click on the ‘Import Matches’ button to upload your file.
Upon clicking on the ‘Import Matches’ button, a side drawer will be opened where you can upload a CSV file with matches, and be notified when the import finishes.
Step 3 - Review the results
After the import has finished, you will receive a detailed report highlighting the results. It’s important to understand that the system will perform a series of checks before adding a competitor match, such as:
SKU existence: Checks if your SKU is present in your catalog.
Valid URL: Ensures the URL is properly formatted with a protocol, domain name, and path.
Duplicate matches: Verifies if the product has already been matched.
Unauthorized stores: Checks if your environment is authorized to extract products from the listed store.
And more.
Check out the last section to see the full list of match addition validations.
The matches that passed the system validations will be matched to your product catalog. The matches that did not pass the validations will be denied, and the reason will be outlined in the results file.
A report with detailed results of this process will be available to you on the Price Intelligence app’s interface, and also sent to your email after the import has finished if the email notifications are enabled.
Step 4 - Handle errors, if any
In the report with detailed results, you may find 5 types of messages: Information, Success, Warning, Validation Error or Extraction Error.
If you see Information and Success messages, it means that the competitor match was added.
If you see Warning messages, it means that the competitor match was added, but, bypassing common validation rule(s) because the ‘Force Insert’ feature was enabled. So, a warning will be thrown for your knowledge.
If you see Validation Error, it means that the competitor match was NOT added. Please carefully review the full message and make necessary corrections, either in your import file or in your catalog in the Price Intelligence system.
If you see Extraction Error, it means that the competitor match was NOT added. Oftentimes this is only a temporary error that happened during the extraction of that page due to high traffic or similar issues. Please try again if this happens.
After corrections, re-upload the file to process the bulk match import again.
When a competitor match is successfully added to one of your SKUs, the last column portal_url in the results file will contain a link to that SKU on the Price Intelligence portal for an optional quick check.
Validations performed during the match addition operations
Our Price Intelligence system performs several validations before adding a competitor match. The detailed results of these operations will be included in a report file once the import task is finished, for each and every competitor listing informed in your file.
Examples of messages included:
message_type | message |
Information | No action needed. This product was already matched to this SKU. |
Success | Product match added successfully. |
Success | This product was already matched to this SKU but under a different URL. URL has been updated. |
Validation Error | We did not find your informed SKU in your catalog. |
Validation Error | Invalid URL. Please make sure the URL has a protocol, domain name, and path. |
Validation Error | This product was already matched and verified to another SKU 12345 as an exact match. |
Validation Error | A different product from this same store was already matched and verified to this SKU as an exact match. |
Validation Error | We did not find the competitor SKU variant code provided under this URL. Please make sure that the informed competitor SKU variant code and URL are correct. |
Validation Error | The provided URL has multiple SKU variants. Please inform the code of the SKU variant you want in the competitor_sku column in your file. |
Validation Error | Incorrect values in the match_type column. Accepted values are ‘exact’ or 'equivalent', case insensitive. |
Validation Error | Unauthorized store. Your environment is not registered to extract products from this store. |
Validation Error | Not supported character in the SKU column. Only ASCII characters are supported. |
Extraction Error | An error happened during extraction (error code 123). It could be a temporary conflict with other tasks. Please try again. |
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