Product data
Your catalog is the first thing a buyer meets and the last thing anyone wants to rebuild. For most B2B companies it is also the biggest single piece of work in a shop project. The software is rarely the reason. Product data usually lives in six places at once and has never been written down in one structure.
This area covers the whole road: what product information management is and why you need it, how to design a data model that survives your next 5,000 articles, how to get data in, and how to keep it trustworthy once it is there.
Understand
The concepts, before any clicking. Vendor-neutral: this is how PIM works anywhere, then how it works here.
- How product information management works — why a PIM exists, and what breaks without one.
- The catalog data model — attributes, families, variants and categories, and how they fit together.
- Channels, locales and completeness — the same product, different answers per shop and per language.
Model your data
Design the structure once, properly. Everything downstream depends on it.
- Plan your data model — the decisions to make before you create anything.
- Attributes and attribute groups — the fields a product can have.
- Families — which fields a given kind of product must have.
- Variants and family variants — one article, many sizes, without duplicating everything.
- Categories — the tree buyers browse, and rule-based categories that fill themselves.
- Reference entities — manufacturers, materials and certificates as real records instead of free text.
- Assets and asset families — images, datasheets and drawings, managed rather than attached.
- Measurements and units — millimetres and inches, without a conversion bug.
Fill the catalog
Getting data in at the scale B2B operates at.
- Create a product — the manual path, once, to see how the model behaves.
- Prepare your import file — the step that decides whether the import works.
- Import products in bulk — thousands of articles, repeatably.
- Edit many products at once — fix a field across a selection.
Keep it healthy
A catalog is never finished. This is the maintenance loop.
- Completeness and readiness — knowing what is not ready to publish, before a buyer finds out.
- Data quality in practice — the checks worth running every week.
- Why a product is not showing up — the six usual causes, in the order to check them.