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1\section{Conclusion}\label{sec:conclusion}2Using a documented, read-only snapshot of an aggregator of Quebec online stores, we asked whether product-level catalogues reveal the spatial organisation of a province's online retail economy beyond what business counts show. The verdict on each preregistered hypothesis is as follows. \textbf{H1} (regional specialization) is \emph{partially supported}: the merchants located in a region publish systematically different categories from a random reallocation of merchants, under every sample and labelling variant, but listing-weighted composition is indistinguishable from chance once the largest catalogues are counted or trimmed. \textbf{H2} (diversity and scale) is \emph{inconclusive}: rarefied diversity spans a narrow range and shows no detectable association with population, business counts, income or density across sixteen regions. \textbf{H3} (concentration) is \emph{supported}: a Gini of 0.85 and a top decile holding 79\% of listings, with a power-law tail. \textbf{H4} (related diversification) is \emph{exploratory}: a positive store-level association between relatedness density and category entry over ten weeks, untestable at the region level. \textbf{H5} (price dispersion) is \emph{supported} on both tests: region effects on matched-product prices are jointly significant, and resellers post lower prices than producers for the same item. \textbf{H6} (local-origin premium) is \emph{untestable} in this source. \textbf{H7} (complexity indicator) is \emph{not validated}: the ECI-type ranking is unstable under resampling of merchants on a $17\times20$ matrix, and the Quebec Digital Assortment and Complexity Index is published as components without a composite.34Two lessons travel beyond Quebec. First, catalogue data from independent merchants carry a regional signal, but it is a signal about who sells, not about how much is listed; any regional indicator built on listing counts without a merchant-preserving null will mistake the location of large catalogues for specialization. Second, the measurement defects of such sources --- category labels at 46\% precision, a fifth of listings without a location, six-fold variation in coverage --- are large but measurable, and measuring them changes conclusions: the audited classifier moved the leading specializations of several regions, and the coverage audit explains the apparent over-performance of the agri-food regions. The natural next steps are the ones the source cannot yet support: a price panel with store pinning, product-level provenance from certification marks, civic-address geocoding, and a probability sample of merchants against which the aggregator's coverage could be turned into weights.5
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