Distributors and Retailers often receive product data in bulk from their suppliers, which could contain new products to be onboarded, or existing products that have a few updated fields. These could be the price, the color, other specs, or maybe latest warranties and user guides. Of course, this set also contains some existing products that are exactly the same.
To process this data, both old and new, and segregating each record into the relevant pile is a drudgerous task. This segregation cannot even be overlooked, because each data set needs to be processed differently, and can make or break a company’s product catalog.
Often how this works is that a new product has to be classified into the appropriate category first, and then needs to be enriched. An existing product with changes in certain details needs to have those particular fields updated. Lastly, existing products with no changes are ignored, since they already exist in the catalog as is.
The primary challenge of course is figuring out these three categories– new, refined, and old. That being said, it is quite straightforward to identify the new products, since they would have a unique identifier attached to them. However, with products that existed before but have now been refined slightly, the distributors’ task becomes to identify and understand what has changed. Since there are no flags on which old products might have been changed, they need to carefully look at all the existing products to identify whether something has been changed. This takes place through a matching exercise. Here, attributes, images, documents and features of these products are compared. It is after this entire process that the three categories are identified and worked upon.
With our Supplier Connector model, this long and mundane process of identification, classification, and updating is automated with a human-in-the-loop. This makes the procedure efficient, accurate, and not to mention, scalable.
Your product catalog will now be sorted accurately and efficiently, including your product data, which will be enriched and updated constantly!