Hi everyone. So a friend of mine has come to me with a problem. He is in the gun shop industry and has created an online website for himself on Wix. So one of his main problems is adding every single product that he sell onto the website, but he has been doing it manually for every single item. So with Wix you can add an image, name, description, additional info sections, pricing, custom text and product options for every product. So for example, let's say he would like to add the Hornady A-Tip 190GR 7mm product to the website then it would look like this:

Image: Upload Image of the bullet.

Name:  
7MM 190GR HORNADY A-TIP (100)

Description:  
Tip Design

* Aluminum tip is precision machined and longer than polymer tips which moves the center of gravity and enhances inflight stability.
* The patented DVRT™ (Drag Variability Reduction Technology) tip design features a flat meplat that increases bullet drag uniformity for less dispersion and smaller groups at longer ranges.
* Perfect blend of ogive, tip length, bearing surface and optimized boattail by caliber.

Performance

* Doppler radar verified low drag coefficient (high BC) bullets are forgiving of twist rate, seating depth and muzzle velocity.
* Refined design of the AMP® bullet jacket offers industry leading uniformity and concentricity.

Manufacturing

* Right off the press – sequentially packaged, one clone after another for the ultimate in consistent performance.
* Minimal handling throughout the manufacturing process ensures consistency from bullet to bullet.
* Packaged with a polishing bag to prepare bullets for loading (bullets aren’t bulk washed after manufacture).

Specification (Additional Info Sections):

  
Product Details

Caliber: 7mm .284

Product Line: A TIP

Sectional Density: .335

Ballistic Coefficient: .838 (G1) .422 (G7)

Weight: 190gr

Box Count: 100

Item #28506

  
Pricing.

  
Inventory and Shipping:

Status: In Stock  
SKU: HB28506  
Shipping weight: 1kg

The problem with this is that the suppliers normally give him either excel spreadsheets or pdf files. And in these files there is just the name of the item, the LOCAL SKU number, a small description, and the pricing. So once he decided which items he will stock in his store, he will go to the official manufacturer website, and get all the information regarding that product from the website, and input that info manually into the website when he adds the new product. 

  
So I have been working on this for quite some time, and we’ve already tried a lot of things, but we are still stuck on reliability.

# What we built so far

I built a Python desktop tool (Tkinter) that:

* Loads supplier files (`.xlsx`, `.xls`, [.pdf](vscode-file://vscode-app/c:/Users/micha/AppData/Local/Programs/Microsoft%20VS%20Code/resources/app/out/vs/code/electron-browser/workbench/workbench.html))
* Normalizes inconsistent columns from different suppliers
* Lets us select which products to include
* Calculates VAT/markup pricing
* Detects likely duplicates against existing Wix exports
* Exports to a Wix-compatible CSV
* Tries to enrich products from **official manufacturer websites only** (not retailers)

We also added:

* Confidence scoring
* Review/approve/reject workflow
* Manual override locking (so user edits are not overwritten)
* Staged matching pipeline (memory exact match -> deterministic direct/catalog match -> constrained search fallback)
* Persistent local “memory” DB so previously validated matches can be reused

# Main problem

The system works **sometimes**, but still fails too often when matching supplier product names/codes to the exact manufacturer product page.

Examples of what goes wrong:

1. **Unknown manufacturer mapping**
   * Supplier uses brand variants (e.g., `FRANKFORD` vs `FRANKFORD ARSENAL`) and it fails with `no_match_unknown_manufacturer` unless explicitly mapped.
2. **Wrong variant matches**
   * Finds correct product family but wrong variant (wrong grain/caliber/style).
   * Example pattern: name says one variant, enrichment pulls nearby sibling variant text.
3. **Family page vs product page issue**
   * It finds a category/family page (e.g., “Pro-Hunter family”) instead of exact SKU/variant product page.
4. **Unstructured supplier data**
   * Supplier sheets often have local SKUs, mixed formats, partial descriptions, merged cells, headers inside data, etc.
   * Not always a clean global manufacturer SKU.

# Why this workflow still struggles

The core issue is an **entity resolution / record linkage** problem:  
we need to map messy supplier records to a canonical manufacturer product record with near-perfect precision.

Traditional web search + scraping is inherently noisy for this domain because:

* Product families contain many close variants
* Naming conventions differ by supplier
* Codes are inconsistent (local SKU vs manufacturer item#)
* Small token differences matter a lot (e.g., 69gr vs 88gr, HP vs HP/FN, etc.)

# What we’re asking for advice on

For people who have solved similar supplier-to-catalog mapping problems at scale:

1. What architecture would you use for **high-precision product identity resolution**?
2. Would you build a canonical master catalog first (per brand) and only match into that?
3. Best approach for handling incomplete supplier rows with local-only SKUs?
4. Any proven fuzzy+deterministic hybrid matching strategy/tools you recommend?
5. Would you use a vector search step at all, or keep this purely deterministic + rules?
6. Any open-source libraries/workflows for product matching in e-commerce import pipelines?
7. Any advice would be greatly appreciated!

Our priority is **accuracy over coverage**.  
We would rather return [no\_match](vscode-file://vscode-app/c:/Users/micha/AppData/Local/Programs/Microsoft%20VS%20Code/resources/app/out/vs/code/electron-browser/workbench/workbench.html) than populate wrong data.

Automated Supplier-to-Official Product Mapping and Wix Import Reliability Pipeline