Technical product content6 min read
Writing specifications buyers can compare
Two products, same specification, written three different ways. Your customer cannot compare them, so they leave.
ReadA buyer choosing between three products opens three tabs. If your specification is written differently from the other two they cannot compare, and the cognitive cost of working it out usually resolves in favour of whoever made it easy.
Comparable specifications need three things, none of them difficult and all three decaying without deliberate maintenance. Consistent naming: the same attribute under the same name everywhere, which is the most commonly violated rule in technical catalogues because names get copied from whatever the supplier called them. Consistent units: one unit per attribute, converted on import rather than at display time, with the unit in the attribute label rather than in every value. And structure.
Structure is the single most valuable change. A specification stored as text — "24V DC, 10A, DIN rail mount, IP20" — is visible to a human and invisible to your storefront. You cannot filter to products between 20 and 30 volts, cannot sort by current, cannot build a comparison table. Stored as fields, each of those becomes a filter, a sort and a facet. The work at entry is identical; the capability afterwards is not.
If you already have thousands of products with specifications as prose, migrate one category at a time. Start with the highest revenue, define its canonical attribute list, parse what you can, review the exceptions by hand, then turn on filtering and measure whether it changed anything before committing to the rest.
Guides in this topic
See it against your own catalogue.
Thirty minutes. Bring three supplier URLs and we will capture them live, so you are judging the output rather than the pitch.