Problems with Product Matching

Lately I have been battling product matching more than being helped by it and that has boiled over in this post.

For the consumer, product matching should lead to the best consumer experience by showing competing merchants offering the same item. By lining up these merchants together, a consumer should then be able to judge quickly the differences in price, reliability, brand strength of the seller, etc. Unfortunately, that doesn’t always happen.

To illustrate my point, I’ve picked a quick example from Shopping.com for a protein shake. I don’t want to pick on Shopping because this is not exclusively their issue. However, this is the most illustrative example of the issues I am finding more and more of recently.

You can click on the image included here to expand and see in detail what I writing about.

In this instance, a single product,  “Optimum Nutrition 100% Whey Protein Vanilla Ice Cream Gold 10.35lb” is shown. However, looking at the merchants who are selling this product quickly turn into an adventure in confusion and consternation for the consumer. Not only are different types shown, but the arrangement creates more issues. There are 20 listings total (instead of the 9 shown in the search result preview), and 13 of those listings are from Amazon. Then, looking at pricing, prices range all the way from $68.90 to $823.24. If I am a consumer, 2 things happen:

1) I am thoroughly confused
2) I conclude I should go to Amazon to look for products, not Shopping.com

Obviously, I have not even mentioned what a merchant should do here. If I were selling this product, I would do my best to try and break out my product from this listing match and move elsewhere. The downfall to that is, based on the channel’s emphasis on displaying matched listings, I will get pushed way down in results unless bidding a substantial amount.

The lesson here is that channels need to be on alert for issues in product matching and consumer experience. Having Amazon overrun merchant listings is an issue, creating relevant matches is an issue, and creating a sensible consumer experience is an issue. For merchants, the lesson is to be vigilant, and ready to alter your data and strategy, if needed to break out of bad situations.

February 26th, 2009