Active listing price
A seller's current asking price. It may include negotiation room and does not prove that a transaction occurred.
Marketplace price methodology
Price evidence without false precision.
VLSI Market can compare marketplace and distributor evidence only after product identity, transaction status, normalization, quality, and reuse rights pass separate gates. A visible asking price never becomes a confirmed market price by aggregation.
Price ontology
Four classes answer four different questions.
They may share a product identity, currency, and date, but they never share a label or evidence standard.
Completed sale price
A transaction explicitly identified as completed or sold by an authorized source. Listing disappearance is never accepted as sale evidence.
Distributor price
A current authorized-distributor quote tied to a manufacturer part number, quantity break, package basis, region, and collection time.
Estimated fair market price
A derived estimate calculated only from observations that may legally be retained and transformed. It always names its inputs and uncertainty.
Status firewall
The sale label requires positive transaction evidence.
Neither popularity nor a listing-state change can cross the firewall.
| Observed signal | Published class | Never interpreted as |
|---|---|---|
| Live marketplace offer | Active listing price | Completed sale, accepted offer, realized price, or demand |
| Listing disappears or ends | Unavailable listing state | Sale or confirmed transaction |
| Bid, review, watcher, or recent-volume count | Source-native activity context | Units sold, transaction price, or liquidity without an explicit definition |
| Official sold or completed record | Completed sale price, subject to reuse rights | Current offer or market-wide price without normalization |
| Authorized distributor quote | Distributor price | Retail transaction, manufacturer ASP, contract price, or completed sale |
Rights-aware connectors
Discovery access is not republication permission.
The structured registry is controlling. This readable audit summarizes official access and terms pages; it contains no copied listings or market observations.
| Source | Accessible evidence | Completed sales | Retention position | Default connector state |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| AmazonOfficial access documentation | Current affiliate offers | Not exposed | Short-lived content onlyOfficial terms | Disabled pending rights |
| eBayOfficial access documentation | Current Browse listings | Restricted Marketplace Insights | Freshness and use limits applyOfficial terms | Disabled pending rights |
| NeweggOfficial access documentation | Authenticated seller inventory | Seller's own orders only | No public market feedOfficial terms | Disabled pending rights |
| AliExpressOfficial access documentation | Affiliate promotional listings | Aggregate volume, not sale records | Database reuse requires permissionOfficial terms | Disabled pending rights |
| DigiKeyOfficial access documentation | Current distributor quotes | Not applicable | Expanded rights required for historyOfficial terms | Disabled pending rights |
| MouserOfficial access documentation | Current distributor quotes | Not applicable | Caching and storage restrictedOfficial terms | Disabled pending rights |
| DanawaOfficial access documentation | No current public API | Not exposed | Unauthorized reuse prohibitedOfficial terms | Outbound link only |
| KakakuOfficial access documentation | No public catalog API located | Not exposed | Consent required for republicationOfficial terms | Disabled pending rights |
| idealoOfficial access documentation | Approved publisher or merchant feeds | Merchant's own orders only | Publisher agreement controls reuseOfficial terms | Disabled pending rights |
| Rakuten IchibaOfficial access documentation | Current affiliate listings | Not exposed | Shared storage and competitive use restrictedOfficial terms | Disabled pending rights |
Numeric connectors remain disabled pending rights. Separate outbound search links support discovery without copying the underlying content into VLSI Market's database. Historical charts, medians, seller concentration, liquidity, and fair-value models are enabled only when the agreement permits retention and derived statistics.
Normalization and quarantine
Normalize compatible evidence. Isolate everything else.
Cleaning cannot repair an ambiguous product, invent missing landed cost, or convert an ask into a sale.
Normalization contract
Reproducible transformations after identity validation
Identity first
Manufacturer, exact model or MPN, capacity, generation, package, condition, and region must reconcile before price math.
Native value preserved
Original currency, displayed price, quantity basis, shipping, tax state, and source timestamp remain immutable.
Landed price derived
Currency conversion, per-unit conversion, shipping allocation, and known tax are separate reproducible transformations.
Unknown stays unknown
Unavailable tax, shipping, quantity, condition, or sale status is never silently replaced with zero or a default.
Quality quarantine
Excluded from statistics until resolved
Duplicate
Same source ID, canonical URL, seller, title fingerprint, price, and collection window.
Wrong object
Bundles, accessories, empty packages, engineering samples, services, or listings that do not match the tracked object.
Weak identity
Ambiguous or conflicting MPN, capacity, generation, package, manufacturer, or condition.
Suspect offer
Counterfeit indicators, impossible unit price, misleading quantity, manipulated shipping, or seller-risk signals.
Confidence and publication
Confidence describes evidence strength—not certainty.
A confidence result is calculated only after legal reuse eligibility and the price-class firewall pass.
Exact MPN or model, manufacturer, capacity, generation, package, and condition agreement.
Transaction-status strength, eligible observation depth, source independence, and recency.
Dispersion after unit, currency, shipping, tax, region, quantity, and condition normalization.
A high-quality record remains unpublished when storage, display, or transformation permission is absent.
No score can upgrade an active listing to a completed sale. No observation count means no estimate, and a source-access failure preserves the last legally validated snapshot rather than manufacturing continuity.