Glossary

Plain definitions for the vocabulary used across this site. Each term has its own anchor, so it can be linked to directly, and is marked up as a DefinedTerm inside a DefinedTermSet.

SKUStock Keeping Unit: The smallest uniquely orderable unit of a product. One SKU is one thing a customer can put in a cart at one price. Variants of size or color are usually separate SKUs grouped under a single product record.
PIMProduct Information Management: The system of record for product content and attributes. It governs how a product record is created, enriched, validated and approved before that data is published to commerce, warehouse and marketing systems.
DAMDigital Asset Management: The system of record for images, video and documents, with managed metadata, rights and versioning. A DAM is distinguished from a file server by the fact that assets carry structured metadata and are retrieved by query rather than by path.
AttributeStructured product property: A named, typed property of a product with a controlled set of possible values, such as Material = Stainless Steel. Attributes are what make a catalog machine-readable; free-text description is not.
Attribute coverageCompleteness measure: The percentage of products in a given category that have a value populated for a given attribute. Coverage measured by category is the fastest way to find where a catalog will fail customers, filters and feeds.
Faceted navigationFilter-driven browsing: Navigation assembled from attribute values rather than from a fixed category tree, letting a customer narrow a result set along several dimensions at once. Depends entirely on attribute coverage and controlled vocabularies.
TaxonomyClassification structure: A hierarchical structure that assigns products to classes. A catalog typically needs more than one: a master structure for setup, a customer-facing structure for navigation, and a rollup for financial reporting.
Boost and burySearch merchandising lever: Rules that promote or demote specific products or attribute values in search results without changing the underlying relevance algorithm. Useful for margin, inventory and strategic placement, and dangerous when used to paper over bad data.
Structured dataSchema.org markup: Machine-readable annotations, usually JSON-LD, that describe what a page is about. It makes a page eligible for rich results in search. It must reflect what is visibly on the page.
AEOAnswer Engine Optimization: Work aimed at being cited by AI answer systems. Google treats this as ordinary search optimization and states there is no special markup for it; the differentiator is first-hand, non-commodity content.
SyndicationThird-party content distribution: Receiving or sending product content between manufacturers and retailers through a shared network. Efficient, and the reason so much product copy on the web is identical across dozens of sites.
ETLExtract, Transform, Load: The pipeline pattern for moving data between systems: pull it from a source, reshape it to the destination model, and load it. Most catalog integration work is ETL with validation added at the boundary.