Retail — merchandise operations
Multichannel retailer matches 90K supplier SKUs to internal catalog in 15 minutes.
Quarterly supplier-catalog reconciliation dropped from a 4-person-week project to a single afternoon.
Quarterly reconciliation effort
4 person-weeks → 1 afternoon
~95% time reduction
SKU match rate
70% → 98%
SKU-core + UPC + brand-name fallback
Pricing errors from reconciliation
~50/quarter → ~2
Automated matching removes the spreadsheet-drift problem
Annual cost
$2,268
Business tier × 12 months
Company profile
Example scenario: mid-market specialty retailer, 6 physical stores plus e-commerce, internal master catalog of ~120K SKUs, 4 primary suppliers each sending quarterly updated catalogs in 4 different formats.
The situation
What the team was dealing with
Every quarter, 4 supplier catalogs land in the merch team's inbox with new products, discontinued SKUs, and price changes. SKU formats don't match internal: supplier uses '10042/BLK/LG', we use 'SKU-10042-BLK-LG'. UPCs are missing on ~20% of rows. Brand names vary ('LEGO Group' vs 'LEGO'). Reconciling manually took 4 people for a week — and the resulting spreadsheet had errors that flowed into pricing.
What they tried first
Approaches that didn't quite work
Excel VLOOKUP on UPC — caught ~70% of rows; the 30% with missing/bad UPCs required manual lookup.
A one-off Python script to normalize SKU formats — worked for one supplier; broke on the next one that used a different convention.
Looked at WinPure — good but Windows-only and their team works on Macs + web.
How the Genie helped
What changed
Set up one match profile per supplier (four total), with SKU-core normalization + UPC validation + brand-key folding + product-name head-2 blocking.
Each quarterly supplier catalog matches in ~3 minutes on the Business tier.
Review queue surfaces the ~2% of rows that are ambiguous (usually re-releases where product name is similar to a discontinued SKU).
Export updated prices back to the merch PIM via CSV.
“We thought our SKU reconciliation process was 'just how it is' for retail. Turns out it was a tooling problem, not a people problem.”
— Director of merchandising, example scenario
This scenario maps to
Product catalog matching
Your master catalog has one SKU, Amazon's listing has another, your supplier's quote sheet uses a third, and Google Shopping's feed uses a fourth. The Genie matches them all — by SKU core, UPC, brand + product name, or any combination — so you can answer 'what's my price vs. competition?' and 'what's the supplier's SKU for our top seller?'.
See the full use-case pageLet the Genie handle the grunt work.
Free tier is real. No card. No forms. Just upload your first list and see the Genie clean and match it in under a minute.
