Product matching and why it fails quietly
How cross-seller product matching works, the three ways it fails, and why published match confidence matters.
Matching maps one seller's listing to another's. With a valid GTIN it is a join. Without one it is inference, and inference has failure modes.
Three failures compound. A false positive maps your product to a cheaper, different item and everything downstream underprices. A false negative leaves a real competitor unmatched, so you never see their move. Silent drift breaks an existing match when a seller relists under a new title or bundle — and nothing announces it.
The third is the dangerous one, because the system keeps working and keeps being wrong. That is why match confidence is published on every result and why a mapping whose confidence falls emits an event rather than degrading in silence.
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