Understanding Product Matching for Smarter Retail Sales

2.14 billion people shop online and spend $1.03 trillion every year.

Retailers understand the strategic weight of this audience and the sophistication of today’s online shoppers.

Shoppers aren’t just browsing; they’re comparing. They check prices, promotions, and availability across multiple retailers before making a purchase. That means every product you sell online and in store is being evaluated against your competitors in real time.

To compete, retailers need the same level of visibility shoppers have. The only way to get there is through accurate product matching.

Machine Learning’s Role

Product matching is fundamental to a true competitive intelligence program.

It’s the process of comparing your entire product catalog to the market – analyzing pricing, assortment, promotions, and availability across competitors. When done right, it gives your category managers a clear, unified view of where you stand and where opportunities exist.

Our process captures a breadth of data across your competitive set. Not limited to: prices, features, shipping, product codes, promotions, descriptions, and similar products. (And not just data from the web – you should also see in store data and flyer data). Then, products are accurately matched across all sources to stitch the most accurate, up-to-date picture of the market.

Product matching used to be manual—slow, inconsistent, and limited in scale.
Machine learning changed that.

Machine learning models continuously improve by analyzing large volumes of product data, from SKUs and UPCs to descriptions, images, and promotions. As they process more information, they recognize complex relationships between items that might look different but serve the same purpose – helping retailers uncover hidden overlaps and opportunities.

“Think of AI as the broader discipline of creating autonomous systems that can think and perform operations like humans,” explains Mehul Hathi, Chief Customer Officer at ClearDemand. “Machine learning is the subset of AI that learns from existing data to make predictions and the evolution from supervised to deep learning models now allows us to handle massive, unlabeled datasets.”

With ML-driven product matching, retailers can:

• Process millions of SKUs across competitors automatically
• Achieve higher accuracy and speed
• Continuously refine results as new data enters the system

3 Benefits of Matching Retail Catalogs

Assortment

• Product matching means you can see exactly what your competitors are selling. See exactly what your competitors are selling and where you differ.
• Do you know how many products overlap between you and your biggest competitor(s)? 
• When you have assortment data, you can create an exclusive assortment for your customers, identify gaps, and position unique value for your shoppers.

Pricing

• Product matching means you have better pricing intelligence and reveals your true price position.
• Are you tracking KVIs over time to understand your price position compared to others in the market?
• When you have this data, you can monitor your competitors’ price strategies and build customer loyalty by creating valuable offers.

Category Management

• Product matching empowers category managers to make faster, more confident decisions.
• Can your category managers easily drill down to their product list to determine if price changes need to occur? 
• When you have accurate product matching, your team can align on decisions and improve retail strategies across the business.

Common Product Matching Challenges

Even with its clear benefits, many retailers still struggle to achieve accurate matches. The usual culprits include:

• Incomplete or inconsistent catalogs (missing titles, bad UPCs)
• Category or brand differences between retailers
• The need to see beyond exact matches, identifying substitutes or complementary products

These challenges limit visibility—and therefore limit your ability to make informed, profitable decisions.

There’s a solution…

Competitive Insights: Where Retailers Win

Done right, product matching is a competitive advantage.

It transforms raw data into actionable intelligence and shows you where to adjust prices, how to differentiate assortments, and when to respond to market shifts.

Product matching creates competitive intelligence that gives retailers insights on product price changes, promotional strategies, assortment differences and overlap, and other market dynamics.

The point of competitive intelligence isn’t to learn about one competitor or compare one product. Instead, it illustrates the overall landscape. 

A reliable, real-time, comprehensive competitive intelligence program allows retailers to assess their competitive position.

From Matching to Growth

So, what’s the best way to analyze pricing and assortment across your competition? How can you drive growth through data? The answer starts with product matching. 

Match products → Monitor competitors → Optimize strategies → Grow profit.

It’s the secret input to a complete and strategic catalog. Make informed decisions about your price strategy, new product releases, and promotional calendars. No need to copy and paste the same plans from last year. Let your data give you get a fresh perspective. Use your insights to build loyalty, increase conversions, and stay competitive in the market.

ClearDemand

We deliver the most complete, accurate, and timely market view—empowering your teams to act on insights that drive revenue and loyalty.

See how leading retailers use ClearDemand to:

• Identify assortment gaps and pricing opportunities instantly
• Strengthen price perception and category performance
• Eliminate manual matching and focus on strategy

Request a demo to learn more about our product matching library and competitive intelligence program.