Review By Douglas Pearsall

Our client is a business owner who runs an eCommerce store.

He approached Inventory Source with the following issues:

• Duplicate items going in incorrect categories
• Suppliers not having the same category and the platform that the customer is selling on.

These two major issues were not letting the right customers on the marketplace and the target audience was deviating from the online store. This resulted in a decline in sales, order routing issues from the supplier, and delayed deliveries.

The issue of mismatched categories and platforms faced by Mr. Douglas was not from Inventory Source rather it was from the supplier’s side. However, since the supplier is integrated with Inventory Source, we examined the issue where the duplicate items were going in incorrect categories and what was causing it.

To address the issue of duplicate listing and incorrect product categorization, the following solutions were provided:

For Duplicate List Prevention:

• We used unique product identifiers like SKUs and barcodes that prevented duplicate listings from being created.
• We then stepped up on a list matching algorithm which is an intelligent algorithm that compares product data including titles, images, and descriptions. With this, we were able to identify and eliminate the potential duplicates before they were uploaded.

For Correct Product Categorization:

• We did product data mapping on supplier categories to the corresponding categories on the customer selling platform.
• The next step was automated category matching in which we implemented machine learning algorithms that analyzed product data such as descriptions, titles, and other attributes. Then the products were automatically assigned to the most relevant category on the selling platform.
• We also did a manual category override that allowed the user to override the automated category assignments just in case the algorithm was not able to determine the most suitable category. This might have happened because of closely similar products and attributes.

The user platform integration was done so that the supplier and the ecommerce store owner were on the same page. We also introduced the store owner to a couple of suppliers with similar platforms so the dealing and business becomes easy.