To find your product on your competitors website we perform one or many queries in their search engine, then match the relevant results. We need your help to know what and how to search on each website. The strategy is determined by the options you select. You will need to visit your competitors website and experiment with their search form to see what works and what doesn't.
The questions you want to ask yourself are typically:
• Can I enter a SKU in their form and does that work for all types of products? This is the ideal situation, SKU searches are very accurate.
• Do they know the reference codes of my products or are they internal to my business? If they don't, can I put the official SKUs in the "Search" column of my spreadsheet and import this?
• Is that a good idea to copy and paste my entire product names in their search engine versus entering only strategic words from these names?
• Where should PriceZag pick the data from my account?
Product Ref-CodeThe exact reference code of your products can be searched. Only select this if your codes are universal (e.g. SKU) and not internal to your business. Please make sure the format works on their website (e.g. dashes or prefix you may have added)Product NameWe can either search the entire name of your products as they appear in your account or run an algorithm on all products of your account to choose some keywords from your names intelligently. Searching the entire name is usually a bad idea unless you verified that this always works. Our keywords algorithm is recommended.
WARNING: In order to determine which keywords should be used in our queries, our algorithm analyzes the names of all products from your account, not just the ones you search. So the more products in your account and the smarter the search will be. The algorithm might perform poorly if you only imported few products.Search ColumnWhen you import a spreadsheet of your products to PriceZag you can add a column "Search" and enter an expression for each product there. The word "Search" must be in the relevant cell of the first row. If you already imported your products you can edit your spreadsheet and only keep the columns RefCode, Name, and Search, then import it back. You can verify the data by exporting a spreadsheet and include the Search column in the export options. There is no other way to display the data of the search field than by exporting. A typical use of this search column is if your Ref-Codes are internal to your business but you want to provide official SKUs to be searched.
Please note that if you overwrite any data during a website search the new data will be used for the remaining products to search, so if you intend to use the Search column differently for two websites you will have to wait for the first website search to be completed before starting the second one.First word from commentsAnother optional way you can provide us with custom expressions to search is by using the first word of your products comments. This has the same effect as using a Search column except that you can enter this directly in your account in the comment form. Unlike the search column this expression cannot contain a space so you would typically put a SKU there. Your comment may look like "123456 I ordered more on Friday" so "123456" will be searched if you select this as a strategy.
WARNING: If you select this option and one of your comments is "JohnSmith-55 is the password for our Facebook account" then JohnSmith-55 will be sent to the website through their search form. Please make sure none of these words will allow them to identify you.
To disable the word for a product while still writing comments simply put a single letter as first word since we will only search longer words. Use for example "X This is my comment".
When our query for a product returns many results we use keywords and price to match them and pick the most relevant if any. The proximity of their price to yours (as listed in your account) is an important factor. Please make sure to select the option that describes best your price versus the one of your competitor. If you select "very close" and a product is found with a price far from yours, we will not match it. If you select "far" however, you increase the risk to match products incorrectly.
Our algorithm combines the certainty of keywords matching with the proximity of price so there is no fixed amount beyond which a result will be rejected solely because of its price, but the following examples may help you:
• With the option "always very close" a $80 result is likely to be rejected if your price is $100 unless we are really sure about the similarity (based on product name, SKU if we have, etc.)
• With the option "usually similar" the $80 result is likely to be just as relevant to a $100 one.
The proximity of price is neither based on percentage nor on amount but on both because $5 to $9, and $950 to $1000 are both considered close.
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