How matching works

Every pressing of an album shares the album's name, so a name can find the record but not the copy.

Journey In Satchidananda has been pressed more than thirty times. A 1971 original and a 2023 reissue have the same artist and the same title and nothing else in common — different plant, different catalogue number, different sleeve, ten times the price. Anything that matches on the title alone is going to be confidently wrong a good share of the time.

So we work down three rungs, most certain first, and stop at the first one that can answer.

1. 1

   It has a barcode

   We read the barcode and find that exact pressing. Not the album in general — the specific issue that barcode belongs to.

   You start the queue once and walk away. It works through the whole shop on our servers.

2. 2

   No barcode, and it's dollar-bin stock

   We look the record up by what the product is called and take the closest album we find. It's a good guess, not a certainty, so we mark it as one.

   One click per record. Come back and upgrade any of them later.

3. 3

   No barcode, and it's a record that matters

   You search the album, then choose the exact pressing from every one we know about, oldest first. This is the only rung that can tell a first press from a 2015 repress.

   You pick. Add the sleeve and vinyl grades while you're there, if it's used.

Run the barcode queue first — it costs one button and it will clear most of your new stock while you do something else. Then look at what's left.

The rule of thumb that works in a real shop: the cheaper the record, the more you should let the guess stand. A $4 record in the dollar bins does not repay two minutes of choosing between pressings; a $180 original does, and that is the one where a wrong pressing costs you either the sale or the refund. The app sorts each lane that way for you — the cheap lane cheapest-first, the pick lane most expensive first.

A record that can't be found is left exactly as it was. Nothing is written, nothing is flagged on the product, no placeholder text goes onto your storefront. The usual reasons are on what it doesn't do: the record isn't out yet, the barcode field holds one of your own shelf codes, or it isn't music.

We never go looking for a record by its name. Every match starts from something certain: the barcode on the product, or the album you picked yourself. If a record has neither, we write nothing at all and leave it for you — we won't search the catalogue for a title that looks close and hope. No data beats wrong data on a product page, because wrong data comes back as a return.

There is one thing worth knowing about the quick pass, because it is the only lane that isn't exact. There you have already told us the album, so we take that album's main pressing — that is what makes it one button instead of a decision. It can be the wrong pressing of the right record: a different year, or a different format. That is why those records are marked as a guess and go to the top of your upgrade list. On a record where the pressing matters, pick it instead; that lane is sorted most expensive first, so the ones that repay the two minutes come up first.

There is also nothing to configure to make matching work — no field to reserve, no ID to paste into your SKUs, no mapping screen. If the barcode field has a real barcode in it we use it, and if it doesn't, the other two rungs never needed it.