Brands

A brand is the maker of a product — the label under which it’s sold. In MerchantOps a brand is reference data: it identifies the brand and its official site, and it is shared across the platform rather than owned by any one organization. For the wider vocabulary, see Core concepts.

​

Brands are shared reference data

Brand identity is the same no matter who is selling the product, so brands are always shared across the platform. Unlike products, variants, and pricing — which are scoped to your organization — a brand carries no per-organization ownership. There is one canonical identity for a brand that every organization references.

​

How products reference a brand

Each product points at the brand it belongs to. The brand supplies identity — the name shown in the catalog and the official site that enrichment uses when it looks for authoritative product data.

​

Brands are registered automatically — and sometimes need a human

You rarely create a brand by hand. A brand that MerchantOps hasn’t seen before is registered for you when it shows up: on a CSV upload, when a product is created from a URL, or during enrichment. Registration includes finding the brand’s official site, and that is where a person occasionally has to step in. MerchantOps works the site out two independent ways — it asks a language model, and it runs a web search — and when the two disagree it refuses to guess. Instead it records both candidates and flags the brand for review. That refusal is deliberate: for an ambiguous short brand name, both sources can confidently return a different company, and picking one at random would point every future enrichment run at the wrong website.

​

The review queue

Flagged brands collect in Settings → Catalog Settings → Brand URLs. Each one shows the brand and the two candidate URLs, and you resolve it by picking one — or by typing a third URL, which is the answer whenever both candidates are wrong. Resolving a brand does three things at once: it sets the chosen URL as the brand’s official site, marks the brand verified, and clears the review flag. It requires permission to verify brands.

​

Aliases and country URLs

A brand can also carry aliases — alternative spellings that should resolve to the same brand, so an incoming TNF and The North Face don’t become two brands — and more than one URL, each tagged with a country, for brands that run separate regional sites.

​

When brand-site scraping is paused

A brand’s site doesn’t always cooperate. Some sites sit behind bot protection that answers with a CAPTCHA or challenge page instead of the product page; others serve a page that turns out to describe a different product. MerchantOps tracks those outcomes per brand and, past a point, stops scraping that brand for a while rather than retrying into a wall. Every scrape counts against your plan’s search allowance whether or not it came back with anything usable, so a brand that cannot be read is a brand worth pausing. There are two tiers, and they’re deliberately far apart: The difference is what each one tells you. A wrong-product match, or a page that merely looks like a block page, is often specific to one product or one search, and the next product may scrape fine — so it takes a run of them, and the pause is short. A site actively answering with a bot-protection challenge is a property of the whole site: it isn’t about the product that was asked for, and nothing about trying again a minute later changes the answer. One is enough, and the pause is long. When the pause expires, MerchantOps doesn’t resume at full speed. It spends a single attempt to see whether the site is reachable again. If that one attempt is challenged too, the brand goes straight back to a full pause — so a site that stays closed costs about one attempt a month instead of a steady drip of them.