# A national furniture retailer. An end-to-end read of a marketplace-bound catalog — and where it leads. ## Scope - Furniture catalog - Marketplace-bound ## Lead finding - Defects that fail marketplace validation ## Issues surfaced - 72 distinct actionable defects ## Method - 4-pass granularity ladder - Auto-profiled ## Vertical - Home Furnishings — Furniture ## This pass Read & diagnose — step one of the arc ### Prepared by EKOM ### Type Case study — client anonymized ## What this is. This is a real EKOM catalog analysis, with the retailer's identity removed. The client is **a national furniture retailer** whose catalog feeds a third-party marketplace, so every record has to clear platform validation before it can sell. EKOM ran the catalog end to end — **auto-profiled, with no hand-built schema and no manual setup** — and surfaced **72 specific, actionable defects**: impossible material math, country-of-origin contradictions, blank identity keys, Excel-corrupted dates, non-compliant Prop 65 placeholder text, understated kit counts, and pervasive marketplace-validation failures. These are machine-surfaced findings meant as a triage signal, not a verified defect list — a small share may be intentional. Even read conservatively, the ones that map to marketplace rejection, legal exposure, and fulfillment error warrant action. ### What's inside - **The findings that carry real risk** — impossible material math, origin contradictions, and compliance placeholders that map straight to money. - **Marketplace-validation failures** — the required fields left blank or malformed that get a listing rejected before it can sell. - **How EKOM reads a dense catalog** — the granularity ladder, and why small focused passes out-find a single sweep. - **What it means, and what's next** — from diagnosis to a clean, marketplace-ready catalog. Standard catalog validation checks whether a field is _populated_, not whether its value is _correct_. A dining set can pass every completeness check while its material percentages sum to 300%, its origin contradicts its shipping port, or its Prop 65 label still holds a template placeholder. EKOM's resolution layer reads structure and meaning together — which is why these surface here rather than at a marketplace rejection or a customs desk. ## At a glance. A dense, marketplace-bound catalog: each record carries dozens of attributes that must pass platform validation, so the defects are per-item and sharp. - **72 distinct defects** - **4 analysis passes** - **0 manual setup** - **3 risk domains** **The count isn't the point.** These are defects that pass a completeness check — the field is filled — yet are wrong in ways that only surface when structure and meaning are read together. They map to three costs: **marketplace rejection**, **legal & customs exposure**, and **fulfillment error**. ### The standout findings - **Impossible material math.** A Faybrid table lists Aluminum three times, summing to **300%**, two Armen Living items have material-content percentages **exceeding 100%**. - **Origin vs. factory contradictions.** Sagebrook items list Canada as origin while shipping from **Chinese/Indian ports**; Martin Furniture / JLA items are tagged **Domestic** despite Vietnam/Indonesia factories — customs and country-of-origin marking risk. - **Blank identity key.** The designated product_sku is blank on **nearly all items**, with the SKU value sitting unused in another field — records unlinkable to purchase orders and warehouse systems. - **Prop 65 placeholder text.** Warning labels contain **unfilled template brackets** instead of chemical names — not legally compliant. - **Excel epoch corruption.** First-inventory dates of 12/31/1899 across many items. - **Kit shortfalls.** Multi-piece sets declare **fewer components than the product name states** — one standalone chair is named as a 9-piece set. ## Where it fails marketplace validation. The single most consequential pattern for a marketplace-bound catalog: required fields present-but-blank or malformed, so the listing is rejected before it can sell. ### Pervasive validation failures Required fields blank — the listing can't go live. Across the catalog, the platform flagged records INVALID for missing LegMaterial, ProductName, Height, ProductSize, and carton dimensions. Eleven Sagebrook items carry a web/SEO title but a blank required product name; LegMaterial is blank on nine-plus items across vendors — an invalid record and a missing filter facet at the same time. Each blocked listing is a product that exists, is priced, and cannot be bought. A completeness check that only counts populated fields waves many of these through; the marketplace's own validator does not. ### Fulfillment & freight blockers Missing Height and carton dimensions break freight classification and quoting on pub tables, dining chairs, and bed frames; a shippable item lists Volume = 0; two bed frames are typed KIT with no component definitions — unfulfillable as listed. Downstream, blank product_sku means those records can't be linked to a purchase order or warehouse system at all. ### Pricing & routing integrity Several active dropship products show **$0 local and dropship cost** — a margin-calculation error; one pub table has a blank dropship cost; and ProductMiraklProvider is blank on items that then can't be assigned for routing or commission. A special-order lead time of 1000 days (~2.75 years) sits on multiple items as an unremoved placeholder. ## How EKOM reads this catalog. Small enough to read whole, but dense with per-item defects — so a single sweep averages the sharp ones away. 1. **Profile the catalog** EKOM auto-profiled the catalog with no schema supplied — identifying the vertical, every field's role, fill rate, and quality signals — and chose its analysis strategy from the data. No manual setup required. 2. **Run the granularity ladder** One **broad whole-catalog pass** for catalog-wide patterns, plus **three focused passes** for sharp single-item defects. The choice of ladder over a category split is deterministic for a catalog this size. Broad + focused, together. 3. **Group by impact** Findings are consolidated and grouped by risk — marketplace rejection, legal/customs exposure, and fulfillment error — so the fix is prioritized by cost, not by field. Signal, not noise. ### Why the ladder matters Each focused pass out-found the broad one. The three focused passes surfaced **18, 23, and 16** findings — each more than the broad pass's **15**. A small, attentive pass catches per-item defects a large sweep misses: impossible material percentages, $0 costs, swapped or contradictory attributes, and Excel epoch dates only surface when each record is read closely, in a pass sized to see it. ## What this means — and what's next. More than one in four organizations facing data-quality challenges report losing over $5 million annually as a result — and for a marketplace-bound furniture catalog, that cost is concrete: a rejected listing doesn't sell, a Prop 65 placeholder is legal exposure, a mislabeled origin is a customs risk, and an understated kit count is a return waiting to happen. None of these are content problems. A dining set whose material percentages sum to 300% passes every "not blank" check and is still factually impossible. A blank product_sku populates nothing a shopper sees and quietly severs the record from every operational system behind it. A Prop 65 label with an empty placeholder reads as complete and is not compliant. These accumulate because standard validation checks for presence, not correctness — and a marketplace's validator, unlike a completeness check, rejects them. **This pass read and diagnosed.** The same structural understanding powers the work that follows — turning a diagnosed catalog into one that clears validation, ships correctly, and stays compliant as the assortment grows. 1. **Apply the confirmed corrections** Resolve the impossible material math, origin/factory contradictions, kit shortfalls, and Prop 65 placeholders, and populate the identity key — the defects EKOM can correct from data already in the catalog. 2. **Clear the validation gate** Fill the required fields the marketplace rejects on — LegMaterial, ProductName, Height, ProductSize, carton dimensions — so every listing passes validation the first time and appears in the right filters. 3. **Hold the line at intake** Ongoing catalog resolution so new vendor loads come in clean, compliant, and marketplace-ready — the understanding compounds instead of re-accumulating the same gaps with every new SKU.