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.Because brands are shared identity, editing a brand is a change to reference data,
not to your private catalog. Your product data (attributes, variants, pricing,
publish status) stays scoped to your organization.
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.brand identity
The brand’s name as it appears in the catalog.
enrichment source
The brand’s website. Enrichment discovers and scrapes the brand site to pull
authoritative content. On identity and factual fields — name, brand, vendor ID,
product page URL, categories, images — the scrape is the first-choice source.
The brand site is not the top source for every field. Descriptive and SEO content
— description, features, and the meta fields — prefers freshly generated copy by
default, with the brand-site scrape ranked next. Priority is configured per
property; see How enrichment works.
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.Because brands are shared reference data, resolving one is a change everybody
sees. You are correcting a fact about the brand, not setting a preference for
your organization.
Aliases and country URLs
A brand can also carry aliases — alternative spellings that should resolve to the same brand, so an incomingTNF 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.
Aliases, additional country URLs, and marking a brand verified outside the review
queue are available through the API rather than as screens in
the dashboard today. The dashboard covers the review queue itself.
Products & variants
How a product references its brand.
Core concepts
The lakehouse, enrichment, and the rest of the vocabulary.