How matching works

Matching is what turns a pile of scraped competitor data into something useful: side-by-side prices for products that are actually comparable. VantageDash gives you three ways to create matches.

AI matching (recommended)

The fastest way to get coverage. On the Comparison page, open Match Products and choose Match with AI. VantageDash pairs your products with each competitor's catalog using your industry profile as guidance.

Each match comes with a confidence score between 0% and 100%:

• Higher confidence matches are shown as primary pairings.
• Lower confidence matches are listed as Suggestions to review. Approve the ones that are right, and remove the ones that are not.

If results look sparse or off, open Settings → Matching Profile and adjust the category list, size synonyms, or search terms for your industry. The next AI match run will use the updated profile.

Your industry

Your industry decides which categories, sizes and keywords matching uses, so it is worth checking. Pick it from the list in Settings → Matching Profile.

If you connected a Shopify store, you were never asked: VantageDash works your industry out from your own products, and tells you on the dashboard which one it chose. If it picked wrong, change it and then click Load template to replace the rules with the standard ones for the industry you chose. That replaces the categories and keywords on that page, so if you have tuned them by hand, change the industry alone and leave the rules as they are.

Matching by name

A faster, name-only matcher that's useful when your product titles are already very close to competitor titles. On Comparison, open Match Products and choose Match by name. It runs in seconds and pairs products whose names are alike.

Manual matching

You're always in control. On any product card in the Comparison view, you can:

• Create a match: pick a competitor product from a searchable dropdown.
• Edit a match: change which competitor product is paired, adjust the confidence, or rename the group.
• Approve a suggestion: click Approve on its card. An approved match is yours: no later matching run changes or removes it. Its competitor price still updates after every price check.
• Say it is not a match: click the bin icon. The pairing is removed and that competitor product is not suggested for your product again. The next matching run can offer a different product from the same competitor.

Both wait while a matching run is in progress, so nothing you decide is overwritten by it.

Per-variant matching

If your products have variants (e.g. "Pack of 100", "Pack of 1000"), VantageDash matches each variant tier separately when possible so you compare the right pack size against the right competitor SKU. This is important for accurate price-per-unit comparison; see Comparison for details.

Re-running matches

You can match again as often as you like. New matches are merged with existing ones, and manual edits you've made are preserved.

Why some competitors don't match

A competitor might come back with zero or very few matches if:

• Their products are in a different category from yours (e.g. food storage when you sell cannabis packaging).
• Their pricing model is fundamentally different (e.g. wholesale case pricing vs single-unit retail).
• They use brand-specific naming with no overlap in standard terms.

In these cases the competitor is still useful for price history and broad trends; it just won't appear on per-product comparison cards.