Overview
A large retailer runs a curated marketplace that gives customers access to millions of additional product options across home, apparel, groceries, and more. Sellers are vetted, and expectations for price, availability, and delivery are high. To maintain that standard, the retailer needed clear, current insight into how its sellers’ listings compared with other marketplaces. With over 3 million SKUs, competitive intelligence needed to be accurate, scalable, and fast.
-
1M
SKU matches delivered ahead of the holiday season -
97-98%
accuracy in product matching -
50+
data points captured per item -
20-22%
projected increase in price intelligence coverage by project end -
100+
zip codes tracked for shipping speed
The challenge
On marketplaces, price, availability, shipping speed, and content quality all shape customer decisions. For the retailer, tracking those signals across millions of SKUs created a scale and complexity problem. Each product carries dozens of attributes. Not every item aligns cleanly across marketplaces and one-to-one matching isn't always possible. This makes high product matching accuracy rates hard to achieve.
The retailer needed a partner that could solve both problems at once: deliver dependable competitive intelligence at marketplace scale while handling the complexity of product comparison.
The approach
Merkle used its proprietary, AI-powered Digital Shelf Analytics platform to build a comprehensive competitive intelligence program. For more than 1 million SKUs, the solution tracks price, stock availability, shipping speed, and content attributes across marketplaces. It also covers products without unique identifiers, using attribute-based matching to find accurate equivalents. The retailer uses this data to work directly with sellers, driving price and shipping parity while protecting the customer experience.
The outcome
The program now delivers competitive data across more than a million SKUs, with 97-98% matching accuracy enabling both compelling pricing for customers and optimal value for the brand. Initial efforts increased price intelligence coverage by 6-7%. And it’s scaling. By the end of the project, pricing intelligence coverage is projected to reach 22–25%, with demonstrated capacity to increase output by 40% on demand. Discussions are also underway to expand beyond exact matches to include similar-item comparisons. With Merkle’s commerce expertise and Digital Shelf Analytics solution, the retailer has the visibility it needs to grow its marketplace business without compromising on trust, value, or experience.
Overview & key takeaways
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Services
Experience & Commerce
Industry
Automotive
Market
Europe
Tech Partners
Adobe
