Method, confidence, and what was never checked
All research was conducted on 29–30 July 2026 by web search, enumeration and direct fetching. No primary interviews, no vendor demos, no trials, no pricing calls, no product testing. One exception: the Matrixify correction came from the idea owner's direct product knowledge.
The first pass ran 23 queries, grouped: competitors (7), standards (4), inference (2), channels (2), integration (1), open source (4), form factor (3). Later passes added enumeration work — the full 2BA data-supplier list, Forbo's 96 child sitemaps, the ETIM viewer's 5,680-URL sitemap, the ATC member directory, and platform-marker fetches against named Australian suppliers.
Confidence register
Verified from primary or vendor sources. ETIM licence and API (etim-international.com); bSDD contents by direct enumeration; Cin7 integration behaviour (help.core.cin7.com, help.omni.cin7.com); Shopify metaobject limits (shopify.dev); Office.js capability (learn.microsoft.com); Anguleris acquisition of Concora; ISO 13006 existence and scope (iso.org); ABS business counts (8165.0); EPD Australasia and Eco Choice Aotearoa fee schedules; ETIM AU/NZ parked domain by direct fetch.
Vendor marketing claims, unverified. SKU Launch's 40%-to-80%+ completion lift; Shopif-AI's 300-page capability; MindHarbor's normalisation claim; every Shopify app's field-mapping claim; Lucidworks' conversion-lift and revenue figures. All self-reported.
Third-party aggregator, medium confidence. Pimberly USD 30,000/yr (Capterra); Akeneo CE feature freeze and end-of-life September 2026; Akeneo CE running cost EUR 1,500–3,000/month; PDF parser benchmarks; embedded-versus-standalone conversion rates of 70–85% and 45–60%; Material Bank's "$25 per order".
Refuted during research. That vision-enrichment vendors do not serve building materials — this was recorded as the single most load-bearing and least verified claim, was checked adversarially, and was broken. It has been replaced with the narrower surviving claim about the unjoined intersection.
Flagged unverified. A claimed list of tile-chemistry ETIM adopters (Mapei, Ardex, Weber, Sopro, PCI) conflicts with the 2BA enumeration. Do not rely on it. BIMobject's write API, as described above.
Not researched, therefore unknown
Lighting-specific data standards beyond ETIM. Magento and WooCommerce API detail — only Shopify's publish path was examined, so the multi-platform claim rests on one platform's mechanics. Competitor revenue, funding, headcount or customer counts. Customer reviews or satisfaction data for any named vendor. Legal and privacy implications of crawling supplier websites. Pricing for Sales Layer, SKU Launch, MindHarbor or any named Shopify app. Material Bank's rate card, the Archello / Archiproducts / Archify brand programmes, GS1 National Product Catalogue subscription, CodeMark and WaterMark certification, GBCA Responsible Products recognition, Global GreenTag, and BIMobject's tiers all remain unpublished — do not model revenue on them.
Link audit
Every URL in the body and the source index — 159 in total — was fetched and status-checked on 30 July 2026.
One genuinely broken link was found: concora.com/2025/02/11/anguleris-acquires-concora/ returns 404. The acquisition is real but that URL is gone; it has been replaced with the PR Newswire release, and engineering.com and finsmes.com carry live coverage. A correction with it: the announcement date is 18 February 2025, not 11 February.
Every other apparent breakage was a transcription fault in the source index rather than a dead page — a dropped closing parenthesis on the ETIM Wikipedia URL, missing www. on two hosts, and three URLs truncated with an ellipsis. All verified 200 once written correctly.