The Scenario
A new merchandise vendor sent their product catalog as a CSV. You're a category manager at a retailer. The 4,000-row catalog has the same SKU listed as "Nike Air Max 90," "Air Max 90 Nike," and "NIKE AIRMAX 90" from three different regional distributors. Before you can build a buy plan, you need one canonical product grouping — otherwise the system will order triple the inventory.
The vendor uses their own internal naming. You can't ask them to re-export. The buy plan is due next week.
The bad version:
- Sort alphabetically and scan for variants — which works if the naming is predictable and fails the moment a word is transposed.
- Write a formula that checks for keyword presence — which flags "Air Max" and misses "AIRMAX" because it's concatenated.
- Export to Python, install fuzzy-matching libraries, write a grouping script, discover it needs tuning for brand name handling, spend a week on edge cases.
The purchase order needs to go to the vendor by Friday.
The Easy Way: One Prompt in SheetXAI
SheetXAI reads your Google Sheet and calls Interzoid's product name match key API for every row — generating similarity keys that group naming variants without you writing a matching algorithm.
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" land in adjacent rows sharing 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 in column A 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 so base product variants are adjacent.
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 showing group size. For groups with more than one member, write the most complete name variant as canonical to column D. For singletons, copy column A to column D. Then create a 'BuyPlan' sheet 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 sheet.
Try It
Get the 7-day free trial of SheetXAI and open your product catalog — 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.