Definition
A product fact shown to shoppers, crawlers, channels, or AI systems conflicts with another public source for the same item. When that happens, the merchant lacks a single canonical product truth. Product truth is therefore the versioned, canonical, standards-based, time-stamped representation of a sellable item and its material commercial facts - identity, exact variant, price basis, availability, fulfillment constraints, and policy associations - that resolves consistently across every merchant-controlled surface and every agent-facing protocol.
StoreSteady treats product truth as a reference term because Identifier mismatch: GTIN/UPC/EAN differs across surfaces.
Why it matters
- Identifier mismatch changes what a crawler, shopping channel, or AI assistant can safely infer about the merchant surface.
- Without a named category, operators tend to treat product truth as generic AI noise instead of a reproducible finding with evidence and a validation path.
Evidence sources
- GTIN-linked product identity; variant resolution to a single purchasable SKU; price, availability, and shipping facts at a specific timestamp; policy linkages (returns, warranty); structured-data parity across PDP, feed, Merchant Center, and checkout.
How StoreSteady detects it
Capture identity, price, availability, and variant state at the same timestamp from PDP, structured data, feed, Merchant Center, and checkout cart. Normalize currency and locale. Diff field-by-field. Any divergence is a product-truth violation.
False positive risks
- A product where the PDP shows $79.99 and the Merchant Center feed shows $74.99 - there is no single product truth; one of these is wrong.
- A "product" represented only by a parent ID that an agent cannot resolve to a single purchasable variant.
How to fix it
- Identify the merchant-controlled source that creates the product truth signal.
- Reconcile visible copy, machine-readable data, policy text, feed state, and checkout behavior where the term applies.
- Keep the fix high-level in public docs; detailed remediation belongs inside paid scan workflows.
How to validate it
Rerun the same evidence capture used for detection. The finding is validated only when the original product truth signal no longer reproduces and adjacent source surfaces still agree.
Example finding
Identifier mismatch
Observed: A SKU with GTIN `00012345678905` is in stock at $79.99 USD as of 2026-05-20 14:32 UTC; the PDP, the JSON-LD `Offer` block, the Merchant Center feed, the UCP product feed, and the checkout cart all return the same identity, variant, price, and availability for that timestamp.
Likely impact: Identifier mismatch: GTIN/UPC/EAN differs across surfaces.
Probable fix location: Public commerce source of truth
Related StoreSteady issue codes
| Code | Title | Scanner mapping |
|---|---|---|
| TRU-001 | GTIN or primary identifier mismatch | strong_id_inaccurate |
| TRU-002 | PDP/feed/checkout price mismatch | price_mismatch_shopify_vs_merchant |
| TRU-003 | Availability drift | availability_mismatch_shopify_vs_merchant |
| TRU-004 | Variant resolution failure | Planned detector |
| TRU-005 | GTIN reused after material product change | Planned detector |
Related standards
See also
Sources
Run a scan against this category
StoreSteady scans public commerce evidence and maps findings back to documented taxonomy terms.
Run a free scan