What did you buy, product or an item ?
The heart, and soul, and bones, and blood, and nerves, and veins and everything about an e-commerce venture is their products. Everything else that you see on an e-commerce website is just “cosmetic”. For now leaving the cosmetic stuff aside, lets focus on products and their descriptions.
Some common day to day terminologies that we use are products and items. But aren’t they both the same ? Well exactly not. Products depict the whole species of anything and items are the type of those species. For example, the iPhone is a product but iPhone 12 is an item. So technically each and everything that we order from any shopping website is an item.
So, how correct are we if we say that “I have ordered this xyz product from abc.com” ? This is totally fine as a product is treated as the super set and will ultimately include your item. That was simple. So now you know what to infer when someone mentions products and items.
Moving on now, how do we see the product and item description/details everytime we hop on to buy something? Without any doubt, everything from a small pointed Needle to the all new Tesla Model S Car can have a description.
Who creates these descriptions ?
For every unique item of a product there is a description, created by its owner and his team. This role is often termed as a “Product Owner” (PO). The PO works with the business teams in order to carve out the exact item description that needs to be published on their website including the product images as well. This complete cycle of publishing a product and all related information, from a document to their respective e-commerce site is called as Product Information Management.
What came first , product or its description ?
Here is my favourite part of all, is the product that is made/created first and then its description is jotted or the description comes first and then the product is made/created on the basis of that description ?
Well, it can be literally both the ways. If you plan to sell cow milk on your website then you have the product in hand and the seller can put its description in whatever way they would like.
On the contrary, if you plan to sell a Sunglasses on your site you would first need to design and assemble different components of the sunglasses according to its pre-made description and then publish it on your website. For example, as per the designers they would want to create a sunglass with green color lens on a gold plated steel frame with rubber temple tips and then put it in a brown leather case. So here you go, you have the description and now an item is born out of it.
The above analogy does have some exceptions as well. The case when you intend to make something but the result is something else which can be sold as a product. By any means I am not intending to discuss by-products here.
There have been some accidental inventions like :
- Microwave Owens
- Cornflakes cereal by Dr Kelloggs
- The firecrackers and dynamites and many more..
For now I hope the least that you would have got an idea now would be how to distinguish a product and an item and how the products come on the actual e-commerce sites.
Next time we will deep dive into what all happens when you register yourself and share your personal information on an e-commerce website.
Cheers,
Divyansh Khandelwal
