Some electronic commerce web sites allow many merchants to advertise and sell their products and services, referred to as items, through a single web site. The web site may maintain a product catalog that describes all the products of all the merchants that are available to be purchased through the web site. In addition, the web site may maintain a record of the inventory for each merchant. A customer who desires to purchase a product through the web site may browse or use a search engine to search the product catalog for a product of interest. When a product of interest is found, the web site may identify from an inventory table the merchants who have the product of interest in stock, their price for the product of interest, shipping terms, and so on. The customer can then purchase the product of interest from a merchant who, for example, is offering the lowest price. The web site may coordinate the collecting of payment information and shipping information from the customer. The web site then notifies the merchant, who ships the product according to the shipping information. The web site may collect the payment from a financial institution, such as a credit card company. The web site may then keep a commission on the sale of the product and pay the rest to the merchant. The web site may also update the inventory for the merchant to reflect the sale of the product.
These web sites may provide various services that allow a merchant to update its inventory information maintained by the web site. For example, the web site may provide a bulk loader that uploads a file of current inventory information from a merchant. The bulk loader may scan the inventory information to ensure that it is in the correct format before updating the existing inventory information for that merchant. The inventory information needs to be mapped to the product in the product catalog associated with each product whose inventory information is being uploaded. For example, if a product is a book, then the inventory information may include the international standard book number (“ISBN”) for that book. The product catalog will contain an entry with that ISBN that describes the book. If each product in inventory is mapped to a product in the product catalog, then, when a customer browses the product catalog, the web site can identify and display the corresponding inventory of that product.
Unfortunately, there may not be an industry standard way to uniquely identify each product that is in inventory. As a result, the uploaded inventory information may not correctly or uniquely be associated with a product in the product catalog. The uploaded inventory information may, nevertheless, include attributes of the product, such as title, publisher, manufacturer, part number, and price, that may help to uniquely identify a corresponding product in the product catalog. Even if there was an industry standard way to uniquely identify each product, the merchants might not use that unique identification in their own databases and thus have no easy way for providing that unique identification when uploading their inventory information. In addition, since there may be hundreds of thousands of products in the product catalog, even if each merchant attempted to use the unique identification, it would be expected that various errors in the identification itself would occur. For example, a data entry operator for a merchant may mistype the unique identification or simply enter the wrong identification. In addition, merchants may attempt to upload information relating to new products that have not yet been defined in the product catalog. It would be desirable to have a system that would automatically match products in inventory to products in the product catalog and, when not possible, to facilitate the manual matching of products in inventory to products within the product catalog.