Deduplication

Deduplication is the process of identifying and merging records that refer to the same real-world product, so it's counted once instead of multiple times. It matters in e-commerce data because the same product often appears under slightly different titles, SKUs or listings across stores, or even within one store's own catalog, and counting each appearance separately would overstate assortment or distort an average price. Deduplication typically relies on a shared identifier like a UPC or GTIN where available, falling back to matching on title, brand and attributes when it isn't. It's a necessary step before any cross-store comparison, like assortment gap analysis, is meaningful.

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