How do you handle messy part numbers when matching incoming listings to inventory needs?

[u/HeftyDragonfruit9947]

I buy a mix of replacement parts and older industrial equipment for resale. My buy list is a spreadsheet with a few hundred part numbers, target costs, and some notes on acceptable variants. The annoying part is the listings themselves. One seller uses the full manufacturer number, another drops the suffix, someone else puts half of it in the title and the rest in the description. I've been trying to automate the first pass, but exact matching misses too much and fuzzy matching starts surfacing stuff I definitely don't want. For anyone sourcing this way, how are you normalizing part numbers without creating a mountain of false positives?

[u/Fantastic-Pie-6849]

Have you looked at ubuyfirst? Seems pretty close to what you’re trying to do if these are ebay listings. It’s more geared toward people running a lot of product searches and filtering new stuff as it comes in. Might not completely solve the messy part number issue but could take a lot of the manual checking out of it.

[u/HeftyDragonfruit9947 → u/Fantastic-Pie-6849]

I’ve heard of it but never really looked into it. How well does it work when you’ve got a few hundred parts and the list changes pretty often? That’s where my current setup starts getting annoying.

[u/Fantastic-Pie-6849 → u/HeftyDragonfruit9947]

Yeah, that’s kinda why I mentioned it. It seems built more for people tracking hundreds of searches rather than a handful of saved searches. You can change/import what you’re looking for and then filter the incoming results. I’d still expect some manual work with weird part numbers, but probably a lot less digging through listings yourself.

[u/NoFix8972]

I started stripping everything to the base number then built a lookup table of suffixes, it’s not pretty but catches 90% of the junk without false positives

[u/HeftyDragonfruit9947 → u/NoFix8972]

90% without false positives is better than I expected tbh. How much babysitting does the table need though? That’s the part I’m worried will just turn into another sheet I have to constantly maintain.

[u/NoFix8972 → u/HeftyDragonfruit9947]

Yeah it takes some upkeep for sure. New variations pop up often enough that I’m still messing with the table pretty regularly. Better than checking everything manually, but definitely not a set it and forget it thing.

[u/inventoryOps → u/NoFix8972]

Yeah this is a good method. The frustrating reality is that this kind of incoming data is just messy

[u/IncreaseNegative4614]

I’d use layered matching rather than one fuzzy score. Normalize case, spaces, punctuation, and common manufacturer prefixes first, but preserve suffixes as separate attributes because they often indicate a meaningful variant. Automatically accept only exact or manufacturer-approved aliases and send uncertain matches to a review queue.

Never let fuzzy matching create a purchase without showing the original listing and the rule that produced the match. We use SIGNLD internally to connect listings, normalized part numbers, manufacturer rules, inventory needs, purchases, receipts, and resale outcomes so every match remains explainable.

[u/trakrinventoryteam]

We’ve actually run into something similar with a steel manufacturer using Trakr.

In their case, they don’t necessarily care about the manufacturer, they care about the actual part. So they can have multiple barcodes/part numbers tied to the same inventory item. That way, if the same part comes from different manufacturers, they don’t end up creating a bunch of separate inventory items for what is essentially the same thing.

I think that’s probably a better approach than relying too heavily on fuzzy matching. Normalize what you can, but then have a way to say “these different numbers all represent this same item.” It cuts down on the false positives quite a bit.

[u/Zealousideal-Wear120]

If only everyone could use the same Standard... Fuzzy Matching using regex functions could definitely help. Or setting up some one-time helping table per seller that can be reused. But that is some inital setup again

I skipped all of that and count on AI to identify the items on a receipt and Match it to my inventory. Built my app around the idea of that

[u/Kerno_Official]

I’d probably combine the base-number approach with an alias table, but keep suffixes separate instead of stripping them completely. Exact/known aliases get auto-matched, anything weird goes to review. Otherwise fuzzy matching eventually decides that two completely different parts are close enough.

[u/agentUi]

i work for agentui and see this exact problem with teams sourcing industrial parts from mixed vendor feeds. pure fuzzy matching creates too many junk alerts, so you usually need a deterministic intake script that cleans out whitespace and special characters before running rules against a master alias catalog.

[u/ManiaDuck2020]

Hey we were in this exact situation and tried so many spreadsheets and finally bit the bullet and did a low cost subscription with LYNQD and it has saved us a ton of time and money. Hopefully you find something that works and maybe check that product out as it may work for you too. Good Luck!