Catalog and entities for your store

A product page is the page of an online store dedicated to a single product, from which it can be bought: it brings together its name, images, price, availability, variants, description and features.

A PDP (product detail page) is the ecommerce name for the product page: the page of an online store devoted to a single product, with its images, price, variants and buy button.

A PLP (product listing page) is the page of an online store that shows several products at once, each with its image, name and price, and links to each one's product page.

A category page is the page of an online store that gathers the products of one branch of its catalog, such as "Camera backpacks", and links to each one's product page.

A Shopify collection is a group of products in a Shopify store that is published as a page of its own, with its URL under /collections/, its title, its description and the list of its products.

A product catalog is the organized set of all the items a store sells, with each one's data kept in fields: identifiers, variants, attributes, prices, stock, images and categories.

Product attributes are the specific, checkable characteristics of an item, such as color, size, material, dimensions or capacity, stored as name and value pairs in dedicated fields rather than inside the description.

Product variants are the versions of a single item that differ only in one or more attributes, such as size, color or material, and that are sold grouped under a parent product.

A product taxonomy is a hierarchical classification system that sorts the products of a catalog into categories, from general to specific, like "Home & Garden › Kitchen & Dining › Kitchen Appliances › Electric Kettles." It can be the store's own or a standard one, like Google's and Shopify's, which give each category an identifier and, in Shopify, its attributes.

A product description is the text on a product page that explains what the product is, who it is for and what sets it apart, with details such as dimensions, materials, uses and limits.

Alt text (the alt attribute) is the text description of an image that goes in the HTML code, inside the img tag, for whoever cannot see it: a person using a screen reader, a browser that does not load the image or a search engine.

A meta title is a page's title, written in the title element of its HTML head.

A meta description is an HTML tag in a page's head that summarizes its content in free text, meant for search engines to show as the snippet under the result's title.

Price and availability signals are the data a store uses to declare what a product costs and whether it can be bought: the price with its currency, the sale price and the stock, published at once on the product page, in structured data and in feeds.

A return policy is the public document in which a store explains the conditions under which it accepts returns: the deadline, the condition of the product, how it is sent back, who pays return shipping, which products are excluded and what refund the customer gets.

Product reviews are opinions about a specific item, and the name covers two things: what customers leave on a store's product page, with a rating and some text, and the write-ups an expert or a publication produces to compare products.

UGC (user-generated content) is content published on a website by people who do not own it: in a store, customers' reviews and ratings, their photos and videos, the questions and answers on a product page, or comments.

A PIM (Product Information Management) is the system where a company gathers, completes and approves its product information, such as attributes, copy, images and translations, to then send it to every channel where it sells: its online store, a marketplace, a printed catalog or a feed.

A product feed is a file or a connection that sends a store's catalog to another platform, with one row per product or variant and the fields that platform asks for: ID, title, description, link, image, price and availability.

Google Merchant Center is the Google tool where a store uploads and maintains its product data, such as title, price, availability, images and brand, so it can appear on Google: in Search, the Shopping tab, Images, YouTube or Gemini, as free listings or in ads.

Catalog enrichment is the work of completing and correcting the data of every product in a store (attributes, identifiers, text and structured data) so that people, search engines and AI assistants understand it without guessing.

Semantic enrichment is the work of making explicit what each piece of product data means so a machine does not have to interpret it: declaring what kind of thing it is, using properties from a shared vocabulary such as schema.org, normalizing values with units, codes and closed lists, and linking each entity with stable identifiers.

An AI-ready product page is a product page set up so an AI assistant can understand it without seeing it the way a person does: every fact written as text and not only in images, attributes with their units, identifiers such as the GTIN, markup consistent with what is visible and access for its crawlers.

Ecommerce SEO is search engine optimization applied to an online store: the work of getting its product pages, its categories and the rest of the catalog crawled, indexed and shown when someone searches for what it sells.

B2B (business-to-business) ecommerce is online selling between companies: a store where the buyer is a business purchasing products to resell, transform or use in its operations, not an end consumer.

A B2B price list is a table of prices that an online store assigns to a business customer or a group of customers and that replaces the public price for them: a blanket discount, a fixed price per product or variant and, often, prices by quantity tier.

Check your GTIN, EAN and UPC codes: the GS1 check digit, the length, and whether the prefix is restricted circulation, a book or a coupon.