Product Truth: A Single Reliable Version of Product Facts
Most catalogues do not have one version of a product — they have several, spread across a website, a feed, a marketplace listing and a spreadsheet. Product Truth is the idea of keeping one reliable version, with a record of where each fact came from.
Why product data disagrees with itself
Each channel was filled at a different time by a different person or import. A weight is rounded in one place and exact in another; a colour is a supplier code here and a marketing name there. Nothing is obviously wrong, yet no single value can be trusted without checking the others.
What counts as a product fact
A usable fact carries more than a value. It carries:
- The raw value exactly as the source stated it, never rewritten.
- A normalized value stored separately, with an explicit unit or code.
- Provenance — which source it came from, and when it was observed.
- Evidence — what supports it, so it can be re-checked later.
- A state — observed from a source, or confirmed by the merchant.
When provenance is unknown, it stays unknown. Guessing an origin is worse than admitting there is none.
Product, variant and offer are not the same thing
- Product — the stable shared identity and the facts that never change per size or shop.
- Variant — the purchasable variation: size, colour, capacity.
- Offer — a specific seller's price, currency and availability.
Collapsing these three is the most common cause of contradictory catalogues: a price that belongs to one shop ends up presented as a property of the product itself.
Why facts are not silently overwritten
A newer value is not automatically a better value. When a source disagrees with what is already recorded, the honest outcome is a conflict to resolve, not a replacement. Keeping the earlier value and the decision that superseded it means you can always explain why a product says what it says.
How LinqCheck approaches this today
LinqCheck analyses a product page, reports what it observed, and shows what is missing, conflicting or unsupported. Facts become confirmed only when a merchant confirms them — nothing is treated as verified because an AI produced it, and nothing is written back to your store. Product Truth describes the model behind that behaviour; the merchant stays the decision-maker.
See what LinqCheck finds
Run one product page through the analysis and see which facts are supported.