ORIGINAL COMPANY-CONTEXT PRACTICE
Resolve product variants across luxury catalogs
Original practice scenario: A synthetic luxury marketplace imports the same bag from regional catalogs with different names, currency and variant codes. How should identity work?
Written for independent practice using company context; this is not a verified question from a company interview.
A REASONED APPROACH
Model answer.
Separate a product family from a sellable variant and a regional offer. Similar names or photographs are evidence for review, not sufficient identifiers for merging inventory.
Work through it
- Define stable internal identifiers for family, variant and offer, preserving source identifiers and provenance in an explicit mapping table.
- Normalize candidate attributes such as material, size and color without discarding the original values; quarantine conflicting mappings instead of merging automatically.
- Test renamed collections, reused regional codes, missing attributes and discontinued variants; make corrections reversible with a versioned audit trail.
Tradeoffs to discuss
- Strict matching leaves more manual review, while loose matching risks combining distinct goods and misleading availability.
Common pitfalls
- Currency conversion does not make two offers identical.
- Never transfer stock between variants solely because their display titles match.