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When a company launches an e-commerce project, attention is naturally focused on technical aspects. However, experience shows that success depends just as much on the quality of the product repository — those attributes, descriptions, and categorizations that form the informational DNA of your offering.
A product attribute refers to any characteristic necessary for the marketing or management of a product: dimensions, materials, prices, marketing descriptions, logistical references, etc. Together, these attributes are the digital identity card for each product in your catalog.
The impact of these attributes is significant at three levels. For your customers, complete and accurate product sheets are essential to the buying process, especially online where you can't touch or try the product. For your visibility, well-structured attributes directly determine your positioning on search engines and marketplaces. Internally, a harmonized framework considerably simplifies stock management, logistics and supplier relationships.
When IT, business, and sales teams work in silos on product attributes, the consequences can be costly. We often observe missing or inconsistent fields from one department to another, generating a considerable loss of time in manual corrections.
On the commercial side, a misaligned repository results in reduced visibility on marketplaces, products missing from the main filters used by consumers and descriptions that are under-optimized for SEO. At the operational level, errors occur in logistics or billing, creating disputes with customers and administrative complications.
But why is this alignment so difficult to achieve? Mainly because these three worlds work according to different logics. IT focuses on structure and technical integration, business teams seek business relevance and ease of use, while salespeople focus on customer impact and speed to market.
This fundamental discrepancy is amplified by the multiplicity of tools (ERP, PIM, e-commerce, Excel...) and by the turnover of teams, which is progressively eroding collective knowledge around the framework.
The first key to success lies in the early involvement of all stakeholders. Organize collaborative workshops bringing together IT, business and business representatives to build a common understanding of the issues. Complete with individual interviews to explore specific concerns, then collectively validate the solutions selected.
This participatory approach initially takes time, but constitutes an investment that is largely profitable later in terms of adherence and relevance of the framework.
Establish a formal framework that specifies the mandatory and optional attributes for each type of product, explaining their business impact. Define consistent naming rules and, for global businesses, clarify translation processes.
Also formalize governance: who can modify which attributes, according to which procedure, with which validations. This clarity prevents contradictory changes and maintains the integrity of the repository over time.
Create centralized documentation that is easily accessible to all teams involved. Beyond the simple list of attributes, include precise definitions, use cases, and concrete examples.
The ideal is to designate a “repository keeper” who is responsible for keeping this documentation up to date and ensuring its consistency. This transversal role, at the interface between IT, business and business, maintains alignment over time and ensures the transmission of knowledge despite team changes.
Artificial intelligence technologies can now automatically suggest attribute values, fill in missing fields, or check the consistency of the repository on a large scale.
This automation allows human expertise to be focused on strategic tasks rather than on repetitive input and verification. It also guarantees a constant level of quality for the entire catalog, which is impossible to achieve manually.
Beyond the technical aspects, let each team understand the global business impact of a quality product framework. Organize training courses adapted to different profiles and regularly share concrete cases illustrating the benefits of good alignment.
Integrate this dimension into the onboarding of new employees to prevent the gradual erosion of best practices and maintain a shared vision despite team changes.
A product framework that is well aligned between IT, business and business teams reflects the organizational maturity of the company and its ability to effectively bring together different professional worlds.
This harmonization guarantees reliable data, an agile organization and a more competitive business. It transforms what could only be technical information into a real strategic asset, a source of sustainable competitive advantage.
In a market where the quality of product information is becoming a major differentiating factor, organizations that create this synergy around attributes will be those that take full advantage of their information assets to conquer and retain their customers.
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