Product and Customer Attributes: The Fields Your Catalog Was Missing

Somewhere in your ERP, or your PIM, or the spreadsheet your product manager guards, there is a column for everything. Color. Material. Finish. Case pack. Country of origin. Lead time. On the customer side: each account’s tax code, its route day, the name that has to print on the ship-to label. Twenty years of running the business lives in those columns.

Then a product leaves that system for the catalog, and most of the columns fall off. The catalog knows a name, a SKU, a description, a price. A rep in a showroom gets asked “does this come in brass?” and the honest answer is “let me call the office.” A buyer on your storefront reads the description twice looking for the material and moves on. And the tax code that decides how an order should be invoiced sits in a system nobody on the sales side can open.

Attributes are how you close that gap. They’re the way you tell Nymble about the fields that are yours.

Two kinds, one idea

Nymble has product attributes and customer attributes, and they work the same way.

An attribute is a named field you define once for your organization. Every product then has a slot for each product attribute, and every customer a slot for each customer attribute. Color, material, finish, and case pack are product attributes. Region, account tier, tax code, and route day are customer attributes.

You define them in Nymble Admin under Settings. Type a name, click Add, and the field exists. No ticket to engineering, no schema change, no waiting.

What goes in product attributes

The short answer: whatever a buyer asks a rep before ordering, and whatever the rep has to look up to answer. The specifics depend on what you sell.

• Lighting and home décor. Finish, bulb type, wattage, dimmable, cord length, and pieces per set.
• Apparel and accessories. Color, fabric, size run, care instructions, season, and country of origin.
• Giftware and tabletop. Material, dimensions, dishwasher safe, gift boxed, and case pack.
• Watches and jewelry. Brand, movement, case material, strap type, water resistance, and warranty.
• Industrial and MRO supply. Material grade, thread size, finish, load rating, lead time, and HS code.
• Food and beverage. Pack size, shelf life, allergens, certifications, and storage temperature.

A good first set is six to ten. Start with the questions your reps field most and add the rest as the catalog settles. An attribute that’s blank on most of the line is noise, so pick the ones that are true of everything you sell.

Where they show up

Once an attribute exists, it appears wherever someone would look for it.

• Nymble Admin. The Products and Customers grids gain a column per attribute, so you can scan finish across the catalog or region across your accounts without opening a record. Product Details and Customer Details show the full table.
• Nymble Sales. A rep opening a product sees its attributes right under the price. A customer’s attributes have their own tab on the account. Both work offline, like the rest of the app.
• Nymble Storefront. Product attributes become a Product Specifications tab on the product page, under the names you gave them.
• Nymble Connect. Buyers browsing your catalog in the portal see attributes in the product view.

Getting the data in

Nobody keys 4,000 finishes by hand. There are four ways in. Three are spreadsheet-shaped, one column per attribute, and the fourth is for whatever system you’d rather have do the typing.

Import. In Nymble Admin’s product and customer imports, any extra column can be mapped to an attribute in the Map Headers step. If the attribute doesn’t exist yet, create it right there. A blank cell leaves that attribute unset rather than blanking it.

ERP sync. The Nymble SQL Connector maps ERP columns to attributes the same way, for products and for customers. Material from your item master, route day from your customer master. They arrive on the next sync and keep up with every sync after.

Export, edit, re-import. Product exports write one column per attribute. Fix values in a spreadsheet, import it back, and they land on the attributes they came from.

The API. Attributes are a plain set of name and value pairs on every product and customer the Nymble API accepts, one at a time or in bulk. A PIM, a custom integration, or a nightly job can send them with the rest of the record. Send { "color": "blue", "material": "steel" } on a product, or { "region": "Southwest", "accountTier": "Gold" } on a customer, and it’s there.

Attributes, tags, or categories?

Three tools, three jobs, and it’s worth being clear about which is which.

• Categories are where a product lives in the catalog’s navigation. Lighting, then Pendants.
• Tags are labels you slice the catalog by: SPRING SALE, NEW FOR 2027, CLEARANCE. Reps browse by them.
• Attributes are facts about one item. This pendant is brass, ships six to a case, and carries a two-year warranty.

Rule of thumb: if you’d filter by it, it’s a tag or a category. If you’d read it off a spec sheet, it’s an attribute.

Why the name and the field are separate

Every attribute has two parts: a display name you see, and a short key underneath it that the values are stored against. The key is generated from the name when you create the attribute and never changes.

That split is what makes attributes safe to tidy up. Rename “Colour” to “Color” and nothing on your products changes. Rename an ERP field that arrived as taxexemptstatus to “Tax exempt status” and every screen shows the readable version from then on. Exports write the key, imports accept either, so last month’s spreadsheet still imports cleanly after a rename.

The order is yours too. Drag attributes into the sequence you want in Settings, and the grids, the detail pages, and the storefront follow it. New attributes go to the end until you move them.

Two things worth knowing

Some attributes shouldn’t be public. An ERP sync will happily bring across per-warehouse stock or a tax-exempt flag, and those are useful to your reps and wrong for an anonymous visitor. Nymble Storefront has a setting that keeps attributes off product pages for anyone who isn’t signed in, while signed-in buyers still see them.

Syncs don’t erase what they don’t know about. If a product import or ERP sync has no attribute columns at all, the attributes already on your products stay put. A source that owns a field can replace or clear it. A source that never mentions it can’t wipe it.

What this looks like on a Tuesday

The rep in the showroom taps the product, sees “Finish: brushed brass” and “Case pack: 6”, and answers without leaving the conversation. The buyer on the storefront opens Product Specifications and finds the material in one line instead of hunting through the description. The tax code sits on the customer record where the sync put it, and anyone on the sales side can see it. Nothing was re-keyed to make any of that true. The fields were already yours. They just needed somewhere to live.

Product and customer attributes are part of Nymble Admin and flow through to Nymble Sales, Nymble Storefront, and Nymble Connect. If you’ve got spec sheets and ERP fields your reps and buyers keep asking for, book a demo and we’ll map them in front of you.