A full read of a live storefront — every open-box, scratch-and-dent, and refurbished
listing across the catalog. One link in, zero manual setup, this is what came back.
The retailer sells open-box, scratch-and-dent, and refurbished appliances across Canada — fridges, ranges, dryers, dishwashers, washers, televisions, and more, at meaningful savings off new. The entire proposition rests on one promise a shopper has to take on faith before they ever touch the product: that the condition grade on the listing is the condition of the appliance that shows up. There's no showroom floor to walk. The grade is the transaction.
That means the handful of fields behind every listing — condition, price, weight, the product itself — aren't back-office data. They're the whole of what a shopper is trusting when they click buy on something they can't inspect first. Get the grade wrong and a customer opens a box expecting "like new" and finds a scratch-and-dent unit. Get the shipping weight wrong and a $500 range quotes as a $0 freight charge, or fails at checkout entirely. Those aren't edge cases on a resale storefront — they're the product.
EKOM ran this retailer's live public storefront through our analysis pipeline exactly as we would a new account's catalog: one link, no hand-built schema, no one telling the system it was looking at appliances or what "condition" was supposed to mean. What came back was concentrated in exactly the place a graded-resale business can least afford it — the condition field itself, wrong in five distinct ways — alongside a pricing pattern, a set of listings pointing at the wrong product, and a shipping-data gap that turns real freight costs into failed checkouts. None of it required access to the retailer's own systems to find.
This retailer runs on Shopify. No one briefed the system on what kind of store this was, how to model graded resale inventory, or what to look for — it had to work all of that out on its own before a single finding could be trusted.
No one flagged this one in advance — it surfaced because the pipeline checks a listing's own fields against each other, not just against a rulebook. It's also the closest thing to a controlled check in this run: an analyst spotted it by hand while spot-checking the scrape, before the automated pass ran. The pipeline caught it independently.
Three passes ran before any finding was generated. Each builds on the last — no step was told what the one before it found.
Two corrections below are pattern-based and high-confidence — ready to apply once the retailer confirms the pattern. Two more require a business or data-sourcing decision only the retailer can make.
| Finding | Severity |
|---|---|
| Most Used and Mixed Grade items carry a compare_at_price exactly $1.00 above the selling price — the mechanical pattern is unambiguous, though the finding's characterization of it as a possible compliance issue is the model's own read, not EKOM's legal assessment. Worth a look before it reaches a shopper's cart as a "was/now" badge. | Critical |
| One product page carries 139 serialized inventory units modeled as Shopify variants — a structural choice that is the likely root cause behind several of the duplicate, pricing, and image findings elsewhere in this report. | High |
| Four variants show a bare 8-digit inventory number where the condition grade should be — the actual grade isn't in the data we can see and needs to be sourced from the retailer's own records. | Critical |
A representative cut of the 65 analytical findings, grouped by root cause. Where the fix is mechanical, EKOM can propose and apply it directly once connected to the retailer's catalog. Where it depends on the retailer's own records or a business call, it's routed accordingly.
| Finding | Sev. | Resolution |
|---|---|---|
| Condition & Grade Integrity — the field the business rests on | ||
| Open Box / Mixed Grade variants labeled NewCondition (7 variants, 3 dryer models) | Critical | EKOM proposes |
| condition blank on all variants of some products despite the grade sitting in the shopper-visible option field | Critical | EKOM proposes |
| Bare 8-digit inventory numbers appear as variant titles and condition labels in place of the actual grade (4 variants) | Critical | Needs retailer's source data |
| Pricing & Trust | ||
| Used / Mixed Grade items priced with compare_at_price exactly $1.00 above the selling price | Critical | Retailer decision |
| 52% price anomaly on one of 139 variants of the same product ($241.99 vs. $498.99) | Critical | Needs verification |
| Fulfillment & Shipping | ||
| Zero shipping weight (grams = 0) on shippable fridges, dryers, and a ~2,630g cordless vacuum — produces $0 or failed freight quotes at checkout | Critical | Needs retailer's source data |
| Listing Accuracy | ||
| A 75" TV served at a handle identifying it as a different brand, size, and panel technology | Critical | Retailer decision |
| A range carries the full structured attribute set of a washing machine — will file under laundry in faceted search | Critical | EKOM proposes |
| A separate listing found under a handle referencing a different model | High | Retailer decision |
| One product handle carries a competing marketplace's brand name as a suffix | High | Retailer decision |
| Discovery & Facet Integrity — every one splits a filter bucket | ||
| Energy Certification has four spellings of the same status | High | EKOM proposes |
| Dryer Capacity recorded in five different formats | High | EKOM proposes |
| Noise Level mixes "dB" and "dBA" units | High | EKOM proposes |
| Appliance Type uses seven strings for categories that are functionally the same | Medium | EKOM proposes |
| Structural | ||
| 139 serialized inventory units modeled as Shopify variants on a single product page — none meaningfully distinct to a shopper | High | Retailer decision |
| Duplicates | ||
| Same TV model listed twice under US and Canadian model numbers | High | EKOM proposes |
| Ghost unavailable variants sharing a SKU with their active replacements | High | EKOM proposes |
| Spec Accuracy | ||
| Title states 12 cu. ft.; manufacturer spec states 11.6 cu. ft. | Critical | Needs manufacturer source |
| Coil-element range lists "Stainless Steel" as its cooktop surface material | Critical | EKOM proposes |
| Stick vacuum carries a 30" width — a large-appliance template default never overwritten | Critical | EKOM proposes |
Twenty findings touch fields that were emitted as populated — not blank, not missing from any completeness report the retailer might already run. They're wrong, or empty in substance while technically filled. That's a harder class of problem to catch than a blank cell, and it's most of what this pass found.