Product Discovery & AI Search

Identifying and comparing similar products online is essential for e-commerce businesses. Without continuous market monitoring, companies risk missing opportunities and losing market share. To stay competitive, businesses must know—in real time—which products are popular and worth including in their ranges.

What’s needed is an automated solution for product mapping and recognition. Multi-modal product matching, which uses AI to combine textual and visual data, makes tracking competitors and adjusting pricing strategies possible — even when standard identifiers like EAN or GTIN codes aren’t available.

The challenge: spotting market shifts early and making informed decisions

Companies today face the challenge of keeping track of their products—and their competitors’—across an ever-growing range of marketplaces, retailer websites, and price comparison platforms. New platforms are constantly emerging, existing markets evolve rapidly, and competitors constantly adjust their strategies. Losing sight of these developments can result in lost sales and missed market opportunities.

It's no longer sufficient to monitor your product line alone. Innovative product recognition is essential for spotting new competitor products, alternative models, and emerging product trends—but this task is becoming increasingly difficult.

When the Market Turns into a Black Box

When EAN or GTIN is unknown, when a new competitor has not been identified, when a product has just gone viral abroad, direct comparison is difficult. Additionally, many platforms no longer support searches using these standard identifiers. Google Shopping has already abolished this option, which makes it even more difficult to identify products.

All of these issues complicate strategic decisions about your product range. Currently, companies face several key challenges:

• Lack of market transparency: There is a lack of information without a complete overview of relevant products and their performance.
• Unstructured data volumes: Product information is distributed across numerous platforms and is difficult to collate.
• Complex processes: Traditional market analyses are time-consuming, costly and not scalable.
• Delayed response times: Manual, lengthy data collection makes it difficult to react quickly to changes.

Strategic decisions require reliable data. Manual analysis or occasional comparisons with competitors are no longer enough—companies relying solely on these methods risk losing sales. To quickly spot emerging trends and effectively analyse competitors' products.

The challenge: too much manual work—too little accuracy

Companies want their products represented across as many platforms as possible to maximise sales. Often, they expand into numerous countries and marketplaces, just as their competitors do.

However, monitoring becomes far more complicated as the number of platforms increases. Without a centralised overview, accurately assessing market changes—and responding effectively—is almost impossible.

In practice, monitoring competitors manually demands significant effort. Category managers spend hours daily researching competitor products, comparing prices, and checking product features. Despite this effort, many products are missed, significant market trends go unnoticed, and errors in data undermine decision-making.

Identifying and tracking identical or similar products manually is increasingly challenging. Matching products becomes difficult without standard identifiers such as EAN or GTIN codes. Products packaged differently further complicate comparisons. As a result, manual analysis becomes less reliable, more complicated, and increasingly time-consuming.

Risks of manual monitoring

• New competitor products go unnoticed because they cannot be compared directly with existing products.
• Product range trends are recognised too late because they appear on channels that nobody expected.
• Price and availability changes occur faster than they can be tracked manually, limiting reaction time.
• The competitive analysis remains incomplete because alternative products or new market participants are not recognised.

The solution: AI-supported textual and visual product matching for efficient analyses

Multimodal real-time analyses are essential to react quickly and precisely to market changes. Complex market analyses that take humans several hours to complete are done by AI in minutes—with greater precision and reliability.

The XPLN product matching algorithm automatically merges textual and visual information from various sources worldwide and reliably recognises both identical and similar products.

The sheer volume of platforms, products and price movements can hardly be monitored manually. Reliable data and its automated processing are essential. In the best-case scenario, this is done with multimodal AI and visual search for more precise product comparison. This provides companies with results that are not possible with conventional product comparison.

Our multimodal AI software solution for product matching offers e-commerce managers:

• Automated data collection from over 500 global sources—including marketplaces, competitor sites and price comparison portals.
• AI-supported product matching that reliably recognises identical and similar products—even without unique identifiers such as EANs or GTINs.
• Detailed competition and product range analyses that identify bestsellers and highlight new trends at an early stage.
• Flexible data queries that enable both fully automated and manually monitored (supervised or human-in-the-loop) workflows.

Automation saves companies valuable time and enables them to react quickly to market changes. Instead of spending time on manual analyses, category managers can make data-based decisions in real-time and continuously optimise their market strategy.

The result: higher efficiency, reliable data, and long-term competitive strength

Whether it’s a bestseller or a new market entrant, carefully analysing which products are popular and how competitors respond allows you to adapt your product range and pricing strategies effectively. However, manual research and product matching are slow, prone to errors, and struggle to keep pace with the rapidly changing market.

The NAKED DATA software solution provides companies with scalable and reliable data to support strategic decisions. Automatically crawling marketplaces, price comparison sites, and online shops worldwide enables precise, comprehensive market analysis in real-time.

The BENCHMARKER takes this further, offering detailed product comparisons to analyse entire product ranges, spot gaps, and evaluate competitors’ best-selling items. Using Visual Search, you can identify similar products that traditional methods might miss.

By leveraging multimodal AI-powered product matching, businesses save valuable time and gain accurate insights. This enables faster reactions to market changes, early recognition of trends, and stronger, lasting market positioning—driving long-term growth and improved sales opportunities.