Normalisation
Normalisation means mapping every way a value has been written onto one agreed form, so each real thing appears once in your filters and feeds.
- Attribute normalisation
- Value standardisation
What it means
Normalising an attribute means choosing one way to write each of its values and mapping every variant onto it. To a person, Freestanding and Freestanding Baths are the same. To software they are two values, and a filter built from the column offers both, each showing only part of the range.
Baymard Institute, which researches ecommerce usability, says that for filters to offer consistent values, suppliers’ product data has to be reworked into “common name” attributes.1 Numbers need the same treatment: one unit per field and one fact per cell.
The tool is a two-column table: supplier value on the left, canonical value on the right, with anything that fits nowhere flagged rather than guessed. Keep the table and run every new supplier file through it, so only new variants need a decision.
Think of it like this
A good post room does this with letters. Mail addressed to Accts, Accounts Dept and Finance all goes into one pigeonhole, so nothing sits in a box that nobody checks.
For example
A Type column holds Single Ended, Single End Bath, Corner and Corner Bath. Normalised, it holds Single ended and Corner, so the filter offers two options instead of four, each showing every bath of its type.
Why it matters
Filters, titles and feeds all read the same column, so every variant leaks into all three. WooCommerce’s own advice for supplier files is to “use one capitalization for each value, and map synonyms to one value”.2 Google asks for the colour in your data to match the one on your landing page.3
Not to be confused with
Database designers use the word for something else: arranging tables so that each fact is stored only once. In product data, normalisation means one agreed form for every value.
Sources
- Baymard Institute. Filter List Design: Have Filters for All Displayed List Item Info (38% Don’t).
- WooCommerce documentation. Product CSV Importer and Exporter.
- Google Merchant Center Help. Colour [color].