Catalog & data

Option value

Definition

The specific setting within an option — Navy, Medium, 100% Cotton — which must be spelled identically across every product that uses it, or an agent will treat Navy and Nvy as unrelated concepts.

Defined in Variant Data That Doesn't Confuse AI Agents.

Related terms

Structured attribute: A named, machine-readable field with a discrete value — material: leather, sleeve_length: short — as opposed to the same fact buried in a marketing sentence.
Shopify metafield: A custom structured field on a Shopify product, collection, or variant — the mechanism most mid-market merchants use to add attributes without a separate PIM.
Category attribute template: A fixed, reusable list of the attribute fields every SKU in a given category must carry — e.g. every hiking boot gets material, closure, waterproof rating, sole type, weight — built once per category and then applied to every SKU in it.
Product taxonomy: The hierarchical category structure a catalog is organized under, which agents use to scope what "kind" of product they're reasoning about before checking specific attributes.
Backend attribute: Amazon search terms and fields that aren't shown on the listing but still feed indexing and, increasingly, Rufus's ability to answer questions about the product.
Shopping-context alt text: Alt text written to answer a shopper's implicit question about that specific image — what product, which attribute, what context — rather than to maximize keyword density for search ranking.

All 112 terms

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