When products are bulk-scraped from Shopify stores, the database created_at timestamp reflects import time, not when the product was actually released. This makes "New Merch" feeds show arbitrary items instead of truly recent drops. All products appear to have the same date.

Many artists have 0 merch products because their merch is sold through label mega-stores (Warner Music, Rockabilia, MerchNow, Impericon) rather than individual Shopify stores. Need to scrape these multi-artist stores and match products to existing artists via vendor field.

Merchbar pages are JS-rendered (Next.js + Algolia/Typesense), making traditional HTML scraping return empty product lists. urllib/WebFetch cannot get product data from merchbar.com artist pages because products are loaded client-side.

Need to populate artist merchandise data from official online stores. Most artist stores use Shopify but many URLs are guessed wrong, stores are down, or use non-Shopify platforms. Need a reliable method to test and scrape multiple artist stores efficiently.