When people discuss the scale of e-commerce, they always focus on seemingly grand technological challenges like distributed search, inventory, and recommendation engines. But what truly troubles every e-commerce platform are the most fundamental issues: inconsistent product attribute values.
Attribute values drive the entire product discovery system. They support filtering, comparison, search ranking, and recommendation logic. However, in real product catalogs, attribute values are rarely clean. Duplication, inconsistent formats, and ambiguous semantics are the norm.
Take a seemingly simple attribute like "Size": ["XL", "Small", "12cm", "Large", "M", "S"]
And look at "Color": ["RAL 3020", "Crimson", "Red", "Dark Red"]
Seeing these messy examples alone might not seem problematic, but when you have over 3 million+