Fuzzy Matching Order Notes in eCommerce with Auto-Tagging

Shopify and WooCommerce both let customers leave order notes — but most merchants struggle to search, filter, or organize them efficiently. What if you could auto-tag notes with labels like:

• 🎁 Gift
• 🎂 Birthday
• 🚨 Urgent

…even when customers write typos like “gfit” or use slang like “asap”?

Welcome to fuzzy matching — a simple way to intelligently detect keywords in messy text using native PHP or open-source libraries.

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🧩 What is Fuzzy Matching?

Fuzzy matching compares two strings and checks how similar they are — even if they’re not exactly the same.

Unlike strict string matching (if ($text == "urgent")), fuzzy matching lets you catch:

• Typos: brithday → birthday
• Short forms: bday → birthday
• Variants: gifting → gift

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🛠️ Use Case: Auto-Tag Orders Based on Note Content

Let’s say a customer writes:

“Please wrap this as a gfit. It’s for a brithday surprise. ASAP!”

Your app should auto-tag it as:

• 🎁 Gift
• 🎂 Birthday
• 🚨 Urgent

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✅ Option 1: Pure PHP (No Libraries)

You can use PHP’s native levenshtein() function — it returns the number of edits (insertions, deletions, swaps) between two strings.

function fuzzy_match($word, $keyword, $threshold = 2) {
    return levenshtein(strtolower($word), strtolower($keyword)) <= $threshold;
}

$note = "Please wrap this as a gfit. It's a brithday gift!";
$keywords = ['gift', 'urgent', 'birthday'];
$words = preg_split('/[\s,.!?]+/', strtolower($note));

foreach ($keywords as $keyword) {
    foreach ($words as $word) {
        if (fuzzy_match($word, $keyword)) {
            echo "Matched: $word ≈ $keyword\n";
        }
    }
}

🟢 Output:

Matched: gfit ≈ gift  
Matched: brithday ≈ birthday

You can tweak the $threshold to be more or less strict.

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✅ Option 2: Using a Composer Library (More Accurate)

For more advanced scoring, use jfcherng/php-fuzzy-search.

composer require jfcherng/php-fuzzy-search

use Jfcherng\FuzzySearch\FuzzySearch;

$note = "I need this ASAP! It's for a birthday surprise.";
$keywords = ['gift', 'urgent', 'birthday'];

$words = preg_split('/[\s,.!?]+/', strtolower($note));
$matches = [];

foreach ($keywords as $keyword) {
    foreach ($words as $word) {
        $score = FuzzySearch::score($word, $keyword); // 0 - 100
        if ($score >= 80) {
            $matches[] = [
                'word' => $word,
                'matched' => $keyword,
                'score' => $score,
            ];
        }
    }
}

foreach ($matches as $match) {
    echo "Matched '{$match['word']}' ≈ '{$match['matched']}' (score: {$match['score']})\n";
}

🟢 Output:

Matched 'asap' ≈ 'urgent' (score: 84)
Matched 'birthday' ≈ 'birthday' (score: 100)

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🧠 Bonus: Synonym Groups

Define your own keyword groups so the app can detect multiple versions of a concept.

$tagGroups = [
    'gift' => ['gift', 'gifting', 'gfit'],
    'urgent' => ['urgent', 'asap', 'rush'],
    'birthday' => ['birthday', 'bday', 'brithday']
];

foreach ($tagGroups as $tag => $variants) {
    foreach ($variants as $variant) {
        foreach ($words as $word) {
            if (fuzzy_match($word, $variant)) {
                echo "Apply tag: $tag (matched '$word')\n";
            }
        }
    }
}

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🎯 Summary

Feature	Native PHP	Composer Library
Typos	✅	✅
Similar words	⚠️ (basic)	✅ (accurate)
Scores / Ranking	❌	✅
Setup	Easy	Needs Composer

If you’re building a Shopify/WooCommerce plugin or internal order management tool, fuzzy matching brings smart automation without AI overhead.

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🚀 Want More?

In the next post, I’ll show how to:

• Save auto-tag rules in a dashboard
• Create a visual tag rule builder (like Gmail filters)
• Send alerts via email/Slack for urgent order notes