Everyone likes a good product story, but nobody enjoys hunting for the one key product spec that decides whether they’ll click on the “buy” or “back” button. If crucial details only appear halfway down the product description paragraph, you’re making life harder for your customers, for search engines, the marketplaces you display on, and any AI assistant trying to match products to buyer intent.
Our article examines why hiding product facts in descriptive prose damages performance, what “best practice” looks like, and how to implement the practical moves which will get your attributes out of sentences and into fields where every channel can use them.
It’s not the filters which are broken – it’s your attributes which are hidden from easy sight
Let’s dive into specific examples:
- A product page for safety boots mentions “steel midsole and S3 protection” in sentence three, but there aren’t any structured data fields for safety rating, slip resistance or EN ISO standard.
- A cordless drill description waxes lyrical about “18V of power in a compact body”, but Voltage is missing as an attribute, so your “18V” filter returns nothing.
- An exterior paint listing casually notes “suitable for outdoor use, masonry and timber,” but there aren’t any Indoor/Outdoor attributes displayed clearly, no coverage per litre, no weather rating in fields.
Three typical examples where, for filters, search engines, marketplace feeds and AI tools, those product pages might as well be blank. To a human prepared to read carefully, the information is somewhere. The question is, ‘Where?’
How hiding specs in prose hurts performance
1. Customers can’t scan
Most buyers, especially B2B, reach a channel with a clear objective: “Find a 110V SDS drill”, “Show me IP65 bulkheads”, “I need M12 anchors with a 10 kN load capacity”. On desktop or mobile, they scan bullets, spec tables, and filters.
If “IP65” or “Load capacity: 10 kN” only appears embedded in a sentence, you’re asking them to spend valuable time reading line by line. Customer decision-making doubts creep in, questions are left unanswered, the customer may choose the wrong variant due to lack of information, and returns spike (and ‘once bitten, twice shy’ – they may well not be back).
2. Filters, search, and feeds misfire
Facets need fields, not paragraphs. If “Waterproof” is just a word in a description and not a true yes/no attribute, the Waterproof filter will either show nothing or far too much.
The same problem hits site search and marketplace feeds. Google Merchant Centre, Amazon, and B2B marketplaces demand structured fields for specs like voltage, material, safety certificates, ETIM / BMF classifications and more. If someone has to copy those values out of prose for every range refresh, there is no way any business can scale cleanly and rapidly.
3. SEO and AI lose their strongest signal
Search engines and AI shopping agents apportion extra weight to structured product data. When attributes live in properly exposed fields, displayed via structured data, they can confidently interpret “18V cordless SDS drill, SDS-Plus chuck, 2.5 J impact energy” instead of guessing from insubstantial and disorganised content copy-pasted from a supplier or manufacturer feed.
AI assistants do not “read” like humans; they parse[1]. If your facts are lost in marketing text, an AI agent cannot reliably match your product to a query like “IP44 bathroom fan, 150 mm, with overrun timer”. A competitor with average products but clean attributes will win that recommendation.
4. Operations slow down
Lack of visibility due to specs buried in free-form text doesn’t just hurt the front end. Your ERP, returns process, customer service scripts and analytics all rely on clean fields. If nobody can agree whether the truth lives in an ERP field, a PIM attribute, or a line in the description, you get meetings about discrepancies instead of purposeful action on range and marketing tactics.
Put facts in fields; keep prose for persuasion
In principle, there’s a simple fix: separate the facts from the story.
Structured attributes (in your PIM)
Quantifiable, comparable, filterable fields, for example:
- Voltage: 18 V
- IP rating: IP65
- Load capacity: 10 kN
- Safety rating: S3
- Compatible system: M12
Description (in your PIM)
Narrative about use, design, context, and benefits: In other words, the why, not the what.
Customers can then extract info about attributes, bullets, and spec tabs to make a definitive decision, with the attractive and persuasive prose adding reassurance, brand voice, and context rather than hiding crucial information.
Where PIM does the work that truly counts
A Product Information Management system gives you the structure and discipline to keep facts out of paragraphs and into fields that every channel can work effectively with.
That means check-listing the following:
Single source of truth
Each SKU has one golden record: technical data, marketing copy, and assets in one place.
Governed schemas
Category-specific attribute sets, with data types, authorised units, and controlled lists (“Navy,” not five versions of blue; “18 V”, not “18v/18Volt/18 Volt”).
Completeness gates
Ensuring that mandatory attributes and compliance fields are displayed before a product is validated for syndication to channels, especially for specs which particularly drive purchasing decisions.
Syndication without re-keying
Mapping the same attributes to web, app, Google, Amazon, ETIM/BMF-flavoured B2B feeds, rather than having to carry out manual, channel-by-channel reworkings.
Search- and AI-ready exports
Disseminating structured product files to search engines and any AI layer, so that filters, ranges, relevance, and recommendations behave as they need to.
Confused by PIM Vendors?
With 100s of PIM software vendors worldwide, choosing the right PIM solution can be a daunting & confusing task.
Use our guide to assess PIM solutions against the right capabilities to make an objective and informed choice.
What “high-quality” looks like on a product page
A strong product catalogue doesn’t just consist of data; it presents accumulated and evolving information in a way that makes buying feel easy.
Scannable layout
Key facts appear as bullets and a spec tab:
- Key features
- Technical specifications
- ‘What’s in the box’
- Care / installation
Field discipline
Numbers are stored as numbers, units are consistent (kW vs W, mm vs inches), and yes/no features are real Booleans, not creative prose.
Facet-first navigation
Make sure that only relevant filters exist per category (Torque for drills, not for dust sheets!), and that multi-select options are clearly shown (and zero-count facets hidden), alongside any filters which have been applied.
Rich, connected assets
Digital asset management is a key element. Enriched content like multiple angle displays, in-context images, installation diagrams, short usage, or instructional videos where helpful – all these should be linked to the right SKUs via the PIM, not dumped in a folder.
Solid trust signals
Position customer ratings, FAQs, returns policy and safety certificates near to the call to action so that buyers can check these crucial content elements quickly.
Where competitors are beating you (and why)
If a competitor’s filters feel sharper, their marketplace listings are cleaner and their AI recommendations appear more on-point, it’s not because they’ve spent ten times more on product page design.
It’s far more likely to be because:
- They display key specs as attributes, not buried sentences
- Their filters and search index use governed values
- Their feeds hit marketplaces and distributors cleanly, and at the first time of asking
- AI tools can “see” what their products actually are
That is fit-for-purpose catalogue management in practice, and it shows up clearly in hard results: higher conversion rate, fewer returns, and lower cost to launch ranges.
Five quick-win fixes every merchant should tackle this quarter
It’s not a case of having to rebuild everything at once. Focus on those measures which will unlock the most value fastest:
- Identify must-have attributes per category
- Normalise values and units
- Extract specs from inside descriptions and insert them into fields
- Refit key product pages for scanning
- Publish structured data to search and channels
Final words: Set the facts free and keep the story
Product descriptions still matter. They explain context, usage, and value. They give buyers confidence and reflect your brand. But they are not the right place to hide the facts that actually decide whether a product gets found, filtered, compared, or bought.
Those facts belong in structured fields. That is what powers filters, search relevance, marketplace compliance, and AI shopping tools. When attributes are clean, consistent, and visible, everything downstream works harder for you.
If key specs are still trapped inside paragraphs, your catalogue is doing more talking than selling.
At Start with Data, we help teams extract critical attributes from prose, normalise them, and make them usable across every channel. It is often one of the fastest ways to improve discoverability, reduce returns, and take friction out of range launches.
Set the facts free. Let the story do its job. And let your product data finally work at full strength.
Get in touch today and let’s talk more.