Conflicting Product Data and How to Resolve It
A gap makes a product harder to recommend. A contradiction makes it unsafe to describe at all. This page covers where conflicts come from, which types matter most, and a workflow that resolves them without destroying history.
Where conflicts come from
- A supplier feed imported over values that were edited by hand.
- A marketplace listing maintained separately from the website.
- Spec tables copied between similar products and never fully updated.
- Copy written before a specification changed.
- Translations that quietly changed a number, a unit or a material.
Conflict types, ordered by damage
Identifier conflicts
Two different GTINs or SKUs for what is presented as one product, or the same identifier on two products. This corrupts matching everywhere downstream and should be resolved first. Never repair an identifier by guessing.
Specification conflicts
Capacity, dimensions, material or weight stated differently in the title, the description and the spec table. These directly produce wrong answers.
Price and availability conflicts
A price on the page, another in the feed, a third on a marketplace. Remember these belong to an offer, not to the product, so the same product legitimately has several — the conflict is when one channel misreports its own.
Category conflicts
The product is filed under different categories in different systems, so different field sets are expected and different gaps get reported.
Why conflicts are worse than gaps for AI
A careful system that finds two values has three options: pick one, say nothing, or state both. Picking one risks being wrong, so most systems either fall silent or lower their confidence in everything else the page says. One contradiction can devalue an otherwise complete page.
A resolution workflow
- Detect the disagreement and record every value, with its source.
- Do not overwrite anything yet — a newer value is not automatically correct.
- Find the evidence: a specification sheet, a label, a supplier document.
- Have a person decide which value is correct for the product.
- Record the decision alongside the values it supersedes.
- Apply the decision to every channel that carries the wrong value.
- Re-check afterwards, because feeds tend to reintroduce old values.
Keep the decision history
The value matters less than the ability to explain it. When a decision is recorded with the alternatives it replaced, the same conflict does not get re-litigated at the next import, and you can prove why a specification is stated the way it is.
Find the conflicts on a product page
LinqCheck reports contradictory and unsupported values, page by page.