Product Attribute
A specific characteristic of a product, such as color, size, or material, stored as a labeled data field.
What is Product Attribute?
A product attribute is a single, labeled characteristic of a product (its color, size, material, weight, or brand) stored as its own data field rather than buried inside a paragraph of description text. Instead of a shopper, or a machine, having to infer from prose that a jacket is "waterproof nylon in size medium," the attributes material: nylon, waterproof: yes, and size: medium are stored as distinct fields.
Why it matters
Attributes make a product catalog machine-readable and filterable: search engines, marketplaces, and ad platforms rely on structured attributes to power features like faceted search filters and comparison tables. Schema.org provides named properties for common attributes (color, size, material) plus a generic additionalProperty/PropertyValue mechanism for anything not covered by a named field, letting a page declare arbitrary name-value pairs. Industry data standards go further: GS1's Global Data Model defines layered sets of attributes (global core attributes plus category-specific ones) so a food product and a piece of furniture are each described with the fields relevant to their category rather than one universal schema.