When building an automotive or commercial vehicle price comparison engine, the biggest data bottleneck isn't scraping or API rate limits—it's inconsistent OEM and OES part numbers across different supplier feeds.

While building the catalog pipeline for CrazyPartSnatcher (a real-time price comparison platform for commercial vehicle, truck, and trailer spare parts), we constantly ran into the same matching issue across our database tables.

The Problem: 1 Part, 5 Different String Formats

A single truck brake pad, sensor, or filter from manufacturers like MAN, Mercedes-Benz Trucks, DAF, Bosch, Hella, Febi Bilstein, or DT Spare Parts shows up differently in almost every CSV feed and marketplace listing:

Supplier A: 81.50110-0144

Supplier B: 81 50110 0144

Marketplace listing: 81501100144

Mercedes OEM format: A 000 420 00 20 vs A0004200020

Bosch 10-digit format: 0 986 479 R66

If a workshop mechanic searches for 81.50110.0144 and your SQL query only checks the raw string—or strips characters…