What is happening is that we locate a new product and then send that product to WooCommerce. It is now in WooCommerce as a draft. At some point this has been deleted from WooCommerce, placed in the trash and then emptied. We have now "lost" the product we created but continue updating the price and stock levels to a phantom.
When we reload from WooCommerce (requiring us to stop processing for several hours sometimes more) we identify the product as missing and then will recreate it.
It is important that Retail Express be used as the source of truth and hat products are not deleted from WooCommerce unless they are really not needed and the export flag should be turned off etc.