TankHunt Methodology

This page summarizes the current buyer-facing logic used in TankHunt search and species compare views.

Catalog scope

• TankHunt aggregates vendor listing feeds and normalizes key compare fields.
• Non-livestock leakage is filtered where possible using automated and admin QA checks.
• Stale listing suppression is applied in shopper views (freshness window logic in app runtime).

Home ranking logic

• No valid ZIP/FSA: species cards sort by total offers, then in-stock count, then delivered tie-break.
• Valid ZIP/FSA: location ranking activates and sorts by nearest eligible in-stock vendor first, then delivered cost.

Delivered estimate logic

• List price is normalized to a per-unit basis when quantity patterns are detected.
• Shipping base/urgent/free-threshold values are derived from vendor profile data, parsed listing notes, and admin overrides.
• Displayed delivered ranges reflect low/high service scenarios where available.

Eligibility and geography

• Vendor ship-to eligibility uses vendor destination mapping (US/CA support).
• Distance calculations use centroid lookup for supported ZIP/FSA datasets.
• If radius filtering produces zero matches, shopper flow can fall back to country-wide eligible results.

Quality controls

• Shopper sanity gate validates listing/schema health floors before safe deploy commands.
• Build, e2e contracts, and shopper smoke tests are required in the safe deployment path.
• Runtime error boundary is used to avoid blank-screen failure mode.

Important limitation

TankHunt does not control vendor checkout totals. Taxes, final shipping options, and payment-level adjustments are determined at the vendor checkout step.