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Catalogue

A catalogue is the complete set of products a shop sells, together with all the product data that describes each one.

Also known as
  • Product catalogue

Integrations engineer

What it means

In ecommerce, a catalogue is not a printed brochure. It is every product you list, laid out the same way: a row per product or per variant, and a column per attribute. It may live in a spreadsheet, in your store’s admin or in a PIM, and your category tree arranges it for shoppers.

Most catalogues are assembled from several suppliers, and each one names, spells and files things its own way. Combine their files without a plan and the same product can appear twice, one colour can be spelt three ways, and you can end up with a category tree per supplier instead of one of your own.

Think of it like this

A library’s card index is the closest everyday version. Every book has a card laid out the same way (title, author, shelf mark), so anyone can find one book among thousands without walking the shelves.

For example

A kitchenware shop’s catalogue might hold 2,000 products from six suppliers. Every kettle, pan and toaster carries the same columns (SKU, title, brand, GTIN, colour, width in mm, price, image link), so one Colour filter works across all of them, whichever supplier sent the row.

Why it matters

All your channels are fed from the catalogue, AI assistants included. OpenAI says its product feeds provide “structured catalog data that helps ChatGPT surface the right products with accurate pricing, availability, and seller context”.1 Fix a value once in the catalogue and every channel built from it inherits the fix. Patch each channel separately and they drift apart.

Not to be confused with

Shopify’s “Catalogs” are something else. Shopify describes each one as “a set of products that’s published and priced for certain customers based on specified conditions”, such as shoppers browsing from particular countries. That is a selection from your catalogue, not the catalogue itself.2

Sources

  1. OpenAI Developers, Agentic Commerce. Product feeds.
  2. Shopify developer documentation. About catalogs in Markets.

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