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How commerce data actually works — identity, matching, history, provenance and the protocols that make a catalogue legible to machines.

All guides

Guide

What is commerce intelligence?

Commerce intelligence is the layer above price monitoring: an index of what exists, who sells it, at what, and what that means.

Guide

Why percentile beats percent-off

A percentile against a product's own history is a defensible measure of discount depth; percent-off a reference price is not.

Guide

Product matching and why it fails quietly

How cross-seller product matching works, the three ways it fails, and why published match confidence matters.

Guide

GTIN, UPC, EAN and ASIN

How product identifiers relate, why check digits matter, and what to do when there is no identifier at all.

Guide

Data provenance in commerce data

Why every price should carry its origin and a confidence weight, and what goes wrong when it does not.

Guide

Agentic commerce, explained

How AI agents are changing online purchasing, and which protocols matter for making a catalogue legible to them.

Guide

Using MCP for commerce data

How to design Model Context Protocol tools for commerce so agents answer questions instead of stitching fragments.

Guide

Designing webhooks people can rely on

Idempotency keys, signature versioning, retry ladders and replay — the four things that separate usable webhooks from a support burden.

Guide

Store observations, not prices

Why an append-only observation model beats mutable current-price rows, and what that unlocks.

Guide

How often should you re-check a price?

Refresh cadence should be driven by observed volatility and by what a source costs to read — not by a fixed nightly schedule.

Guide

Unit price normalisation

Comparing prices across pack sizes requires normalising to a common unit — and treating pack size as part of identity.

Guide

Why shopping agents need memory

Durable, namespaced memory lets an agent carry preferences and constraints between sessions instead of re-interviewing the user.

Guide

How to get price history data

What price history data is, why it cannot be backfilled, and how to get it through an API instead of building collection yourself.

Guide

Building price collection versus buying it

An honest comparison of running your own price collection against using an API, including the costs that only appear in month three.

Guide

How to build a price comparison engine

The architecture behind a working price comparison site: canonical products, landed cost, per-seller history and published match confidence.

Guide

How price drop alerts actually work

The mechanics behind reliable price drop alerts: standing conditions, change detection, signed delivery and why context makes them worth opening.

Guide

Competitor price monitoring, done properly

How to monitor competitor pricing without drowning in noise: pick the competitive set, react to events, and require confidence before acting.

Guide

Dynamic pricing versus surveillance pricing

The difference between competitor-driven dynamic pricing and personalised pricing from consumer data — and why the distinction now matters legally.

Guide

MAP pricing explained

What minimum advertised price policies are, how violations are detected, and why evidence matters more than detection.

Guide

The buy box, and why it moves

How marketplace buy-box ownership works, why it flips, and what a seller change signals before the price move that follows.

Guide

Why landed cost is the only comparable price

Shipping, handling and thresholds mean sticker price comparisons are frequently wrong. Landed cost is the number that decides purchases.

Guide

Product data feeds, explained

How merchant product feeds work, what fields matter, and why feeds are becoming the primary way catalogues reach machines.

Guide

How to choose a product data API

The questions that actually separate commerce data vendors: coverage definition, freshness, match quality, provenance and export.

Guide

How AI agents actually buy things

The mechanics of agent-driven purchasing: how agents find products, evaluate price, and what makes a catalogue legible to them.