How can more items be imported to target than exported from source?

When executing your task, you might encounter a confusing larger amount of items imported to target than were exported from the source to begin with.

Does that imply there's a bug? Not at all!

In most cases this will happen with the Products entity, and related ones, but might also apply to other entities across various integration options. 

For example:

How an export of 13 items at source can be processed as a total of 26 items, to finally be sent to target as 8 items?



Here's the logic and calculations behind these seemingly random amounts:

IIIIII x 2   +   ||||   +   ||||||||||   =   26 items (or product variations)   

  1                 2           3       =   3 products in total



Target only receives 8 items because you have only 8 "parent products/variable products" paired with Variations. Consequently, each Variable(parent) product may contain several Child products.