What a signal carries
The fields that make a product listing answerable — category, specifications, media, documents, warranty and returns — and which of them decide whether a buyer enquires or scrolls past.
A signal is not a catalogue entry. The test is whether somebody who has never spoken to you can decide, from this page alone, that you are worth spending credits to enquire with.
Everything below is in service of that.
The frame
Title. What the thing is, in the words a buyer would use. Not your internal part name.
Category and industry. Where it sits. This is how it gets found, and putting something in an adjacent-but-wrong category is the most common reason a good listing gets no traffic. Where nothing fits, there is an alternate category field rather than forcing it into the closest wrong answer.
Description. The context the structured fields cannot carry — what it is for, who it suits, what makes yours different from the same thing sold by four other people.
Tags. How buyers actually phrase it, including the terms your industry uses that the category tree does not.
Specifications — the part that matters
Specifications are grouped structured fields, not a paragraph. Categories of them — dimensions, materials, performance, compliance — each holding named fields with values and units.
This is where the enquiry is won. A buyer comparing three suppliers is comparing specification tables, and a supplier whose table is thin loses to one whose is complete even at a higher price, because the complete one can be evaluated without a phone call.
The buyer's question is always: can I evaluate this without asking?
Every field you leave out is a question somebody has to ask, and most of them will not bother asking. They will enquire with whoever answered it already.
Group them the way a buyer thinks, not the way your ERP exports them.
Media
Photographs of the actual product, not the category. One clear image is worth more than six angles of a render.
One image is the featured one — the one that appears wherever your listing is summarised. Choose it deliberately.
Documents
Datasheets, certificates, test reports, drawings, manuals. A document resource attached to a listing does work that no amount of description does: it converts a claim into something checkable.
If you have a certification and it is not attached, buyers who filter on it will not find you.
Commercial terms
| Warranty | What is covered and for how long |
| Return policy | Under what conditions, and who pays return freight |
| Vendor | The brand, when what you sell is not what you make |
Warranty and returns are priced by buyers whether you state them or not. Stated, they are a reason to choose you. Unstated, they are assumed to be the worst case.
Reach
Published scope decides whether the listing is surfaced nationally or globally. Global on a product you cannot ship abroad wastes everyone's time, including yours — you will field enquiries you have to decline.
Search
There are dedicated fields for the title and description that appear in search results and link previews. They are worth writing separately from the on-page ones: a search result has to earn a click in a line and a half, which is a different job from explaining a product to somebody already reading.
See Getting found.