The Scenario
A merchandise vendor sent their catalog as a CSV. You're a category manager at a retailer. The 4,000-row catalog in Excel has the same SKU listed as "Nike Air Max 90," "Air Max 90 Nike," and "NIKE AIRMAX 90" from three regional distributors. Before you can build a buy plan, you need one canonical product grouping. The buy plan is due Friday.
The bad version:
- Sort alphabetically and scan for variants — works if naming is predictable, fails when words are transposed.
- Write a formula checking for keyword presence — flags "Air Max" but misses "AIRMAX" because it's concatenated.
- Export to Python, install fuzzy-matching libraries, write a grouping script, spend a week on edge cases.
The purchase order goes to the vendor Friday.
The Easy Way: One Prompt in SheetXAI
SheetXAI reads your Excel workbook and calls Interzoid's product name match key API for every row.
For each product name in column A, generate an Interzoid product match key and write it to column B, then sort by column B so product variants are grouped together.
What You Get
- Column B: Interzoid product match key per row.
- The catalog re-sorted so "Nike Air Max 90," "Air Max 90 Nike," and "NIKE AIRMAX 90" are adjacent with the same key.
- A grouping ready for canonical name selection and inventory deduplication before the buy plan runs.
What If the Data Is Not Quite Ready
Product names include color or size variants that should be separate SKUs
For each product name in column A, strip color and size qualifiers before generating the Interzoid product match key. Write the stripped name to column B and the match key to column C, then sort by column C.
You want a count of how many rows share each key
Generate Interzoid product similarity keys for all items in column C and write them to column D, then add a COUNTIF in column E to identify groups with more than one variant.
You also need the canonical name picked automatically per group
For each group sharing the same match key in column B, write the most complete product name (longest string with most words) as the canonical form to column C.
Full dedup + canonical selection + buy plan prep in one shot
For each product name in column A, generate an Interzoid product match key and write to column B. Add a COUNTIF in column C for group size. For groups with more than one member, write the most complete name variant as canonical to column D. Create a 'BuyPlan' worksheet with deduplicated rows using column D as the product name, summing column E quantities per canonical product.
One prompt deduplicates the catalog and builds the buy plan worksheet.
Try It
Get the 7-day free trial of SheetXAI and open your product catalog workbook — ask SheetXAI to generate product match keys and group variants in column A before the buy plan runs. Then see the spoke on normalizing vendor names to canonical forms, or the full Interzoid integration overview.