Attribute
An attribute is one named property of a product, such as Colour, Width or Material, that every product of that kind should have a value for.
- Product attribute
What it means
An attribute is a named property a product can have: Colour, Width, Material, Capacity. In a spreadsheet it is a column, and each product’s attribute value sits in its cell. The filters on a category page are usually built from attributes, one filter per attribute.
Which attributes a product needs depends on what it is. A fridge freezer needs a capacity and an energy rating. A door seal needs neither, but it does need to say which fridges it fits. Shopify builds this into its categories: each category in the Shopify Standard Product Taxonomy comes with product attributes of its own, which Shopify calls category metafields.1
The word changes from channel to channel. Google Merchant Center says attribute; eBay says item specific.
Think of it like this
Attributes are the headings on a form: Name, Date of birth, Postcode. Everyone fills in the same headings, which is what lets you sort a pile of forms by postcode.
For example
A supplier’s bath row has a column headed Mat. holding “acrylic” and one headed Col. holding “WHITE”. Mapped to your attributes, they become Material with the value Acrylic and Colour with the value White, the same two attributes every other bath in the category carries.
Why it matters
A product without a value drops out of every filter on that attribute. The names have to match as well: WooCommerce’s importer “uses the matching global attribute, or a product-level attribute if no match exists”,2 so a file that says “Color” where the store says Colour gives every product a separate attribute of its own.
Not to be confused with
Colour is the attribute and Navy is its attribute value. The attribute is the property; the value is what fills it.
Sources
- Shopify Help Center. Shopify’s Standard Product Taxonomy.
- WooCommerce documentation. Product CSV Importer and Exporter.