companies of all sizes
Entity resolution is what you need once you track the same product across more than one source.
Single-source tracking is enough if you truly only ever compare one page against your own.
Entity Resolution vs Single-Source Tracking: Key differences
Most scraping tools track a URL and alert you when that specific page changes. That's fine until the same product shows up on your own store, a competitor's site, a marketplace listing, and a wholesale catalog — each with its own price and stock, and no way to tell they're the same item without doing that matching yourself.
| Feature | Single-Source Tracking | Entity Resolution |
|---|---|---|
| Unit of tracking | One URL | One product, across all its sources |
| Competitor comparison | Manual, one at a time | Automatic, all known sources |
| Price conflict detection | None | Built in, with severity scoring |
| Repricing recommendations | Not possible | Rule-based, anchored on min/max/average competitor price |
When to choose each approach
The single-source model
Simple to reason about, and enough if you genuinely only care about one page per product. It breaks down the moment you want to compare your price against more than one competitor for the same item.
The entity-resolution model
GTIN/SKU/brand+name matching (with a similarity-scored fallback when no strong identifier exists) resolves the same product across sources into one identity, so price history, stock conflicts, and repricing recommendations account for every source at once instead of one page in isolation.
- One product identity across crawl, merchant feed, marketplace, and wholesale-catalog sources
- Cross-source price/stock conflict detection with severity scoring
- Rule-based repricing anchored on the actual set of competitors, not one URL
Entity Resolution vs Single-Source Tracking: Full comparison matrix
A complete feature overview across both options.
| Feature | Single-Source Tracking | Entity Resolution |
|---|---|---|
| Unit of tracking | One URL | One product, across all its sources |
| Competitor comparison | Manual, one at a time | Automatic, all known sources |
| Price conflict detection | None | Built in, with severity scoring |
| Repricing recommendations | Not possible | Rule-based, anchored on min/max/average competitor price |