🔧 5 Ways to Match AliExpress Product Variants — LLM, Embedding, Vision, Rules, and Why I Chose None of Them Alone

TL;DR — I compared 5 technical approaches for matching product variants across AliExpress suppliers: string rules, vector embeddings, LLM prompting, vision models (CNN/CLIP), and hybrid algorithmic. Each has clear trade-offs in accuracy, speed, cost, and tolerance for real-world naming chaos. I ended up building a hybrid algorithm — no model, no...