Staples

Currently, Staples is the largest company in its sector, serving customers in 30 European countries and 20 additional markets globally. They go beyond merely providing office supplies; they aim to assist customers in reaching their objectives. This includes offering a customer-friendly online shop where users can easily access product variations and alternatives. The identification of these product relationships can be automated through PowerRelate, eliminating the need for excessive manual labor.

Challenge  

Staples provides an extensive selection of office supplies and aims to present these products in a straightforward manner for customers. A desirable feature for customers is the ability to view various product options at a glance. For instance, when a customer visits the product detail page of a desk, it is beneficial to showcase a list of that desk in other sizes and colors.

To enable this feature, it is crucial to accurately document the variant relationships among different products in the Product Information Management (PIM) system. However, this documentation is a labor-intensive manual task. The primary challenge for Staples was to discover a way to automate this process with minimal manual intervention.

Solution  

PowerRelate utilizes advanced artificial intelligence (AI) methods to automatically group similar products that are variants of one another. It also identifies the characteristics (such as size, color, type, etc.) that can be varied within each cluster. The automatically generated product relationships are then presented to Staples’ employees in an admin portal for confirmation. Once validated, the related products can be exported to the PIM system to support various e-commerce platforms across different countries.