Is a relisted item the same product?

Why

• A new address is normal and proves nothing. Listings are retired and reissued for reasons ranging from a price change to a search filter, and the replacement usually carries the same title and the same images. Identity therefore has to be established from fields that describe the build rather than from the title or the image set, which are the two parts of a listing that any seller can copy from one page to another in a minute.
• Photographs are reused across builds more than any other field. A seller holding one good image set applies it to whichever line is currently in production, which is why this desk reads photographs as a set: a relist showing the same angles against a different background or a different scale reference is usually a different item photographed by a different hand, at a different time, on a different bench. Reading images as a set is what exposes a substitution: one photograph can be reused indefinitely, while six have to be re-shot together, and re-shooting costs a seller more than reusing what they already hold.
• Price movement in one direction is informative. A relist at a materially lower price for an identical written specification is the clearest single signal that a component has changed, because the seller's own costs did not fall by themselves. The material and hardware questions are the ones to put in writing once that happens, and the answers are worth more than another look at the photographs.
• Whatever claim you make later rests on the first listing. A snapshot of the original page, captured before payment, is what makes a substitution provable, and keeping it costs nothing. Without it a disagreement about a relist becomes a disagreement about what the old page said, and the seller controls the only copy still online, which can be edited or withdrawn before anyone else reads it. A snapshot also fixes the date of the comparison, which matters when a seller argues that the current page has always looked the way it looks now. Two captures taken months apart answer that argument without any discussion at all.

When this answer flips

• The relist names the same materials and hardware at an unchanged price, because the two pages are then consistent and the batch question is the only one left open.
• The seller confirms inside the platform thread that the relist is the same build as the earlier order, because that written statement is what a later comparison gets measured against.
• The relist shows a different size run or an altered specification line, because a specification change is a build change regardless of how similar the two image sets look.

Three things to do next

1. Decode the batch vocabulary used
2. Compare material grain across listings
3. Read the desk comparison protocol