hardScenarioDesignMidSenior
A supplier sends you a feed of ten thousand products. How many of them are already in your catalogue?
5 min readUpdated 2026-08-15
Answer
Short answer
You cannot know without matching, and matching is the work: suppliers send their own identifiers, spell the same manufacturer three ways, and describe attributes in units you do not use.
Keep product data explicit in the answer because that is the concept the interviewer is actually trying to test. A good product data explanation names the trade-off, the failure mode, and the evidence you would use before choosing. Use product data once more at the decision point so the answer reads as judgement rather than a detached example.
Keep product data explicit in the answer because that is the concept the interviewer is actually trying to test.
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Likely follow-ups
- The feed has no GTIN. What do you match on instead?
- What does a wrong merge cost compared with a duplicate?
- How do you handle a supplier who changes their own identifiers between feeds?
- Where does the review queue's workload come from, and how do you shrink it?
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