Everything on your roadmap carries buyer's remorse except one project. Why product enrichment is zero-regret, and three things to do this quarter.
A retailer recently told us they'd stopped their enrichment project.
Not cancelled it. Stopped it. They still wanted it, still believed in it. They just couldn't work out where it fitted or where to begin.
That's how these things die. Not in a steering committee, but in the gap between wanting something and knowing what Monday looks like.
Every question spawned ten more. Which attributes? For which categories? Who writes them? Against what standard? What happens to the products already live? Ten questions became a hundred, and a hundred became a reason to look at something else.
So they looked at something else. A new search platform, live. A PIM rebuild, in flight. A mobile release. A bug queue long enough to have its own governance meeting.
And then they asked us where they should start.
Everything on your roadmap has buyer's remorse
Almost every project you'll approve this year comes with a quiet fear attached. That the new search engine won't fix as much as the demo suggested. That the replatform buys a nicer version of the same problem. That you'll be twelve months in, explaining why the numbers haven't moved.
Enrichment is the exception. It's the zero-regret position.
Enrich your product data well, and everything else gets supercharged. Search works better because it has something to match against. So does navigation. Your feeds, your marketplace listings, your paid media, the AI assistants now sitting between you and your customer – all of it improves, because all of it reads the same data.
Nothing else on the list does that. Everything else is a distraction or a partial fix.
You need the engine rebuild, not the bodywork.
Where enrichment actually sits
We here at FoundIt! call it the Four Forces of Product Discovery. Understand what customers are trying to achieve. Map how they make decisions in your categories. Enrich every product against that map. Then push it everywhere discovery happens.
They run in order, and they compound. Each force makes the next one cheaper, and every channel feeds signal back to the first. You don't need all four at full strength on day one – you need them in the right sequence.
Product data sits in the middle, and it's the force that unlocks the two on either side. Which is why it's the place to start, not the place to get to.
Three weeks to buy nothing
April Dunford, the queen of B2B positioning, tells a story about buying a toilet. She'd bought an old house that needed a new bathroom and walked into a shop expecting to lose fifteen minutes. She found a wall of near-identical toilets at wildly different prices, with features that meant nothing to anyone who isn't a plumber. The salesperson was no help, so she left.
Three weeks and a lot of research later, she made a decision. She wasn't going to buy a toilet at all. She'd keep the old one. And she felt relieved.
Think about that. Faced with a choice she couldn't confidently evaluate, the easiest and safest move was to stop. However, her contractor had already got rid of the old toilet, so back she went.
This time she got a different salesperson. He agreed the whole process was awful, then told her he was going to teach her how to buy a toilet. Three things, he said: quality, aesthetics, and the space it has to fit into. Every feature she'd been drowning in laddered up into one of the three. Minutes later she was choosing between three toilets, and he made the sale.
Nothing about the toilets changed. The structure did.
Selling is hard. Buying is harder.
That is enrichment. Not writing longer descriptions. It’s working out the three things that actually decide a purchase in your category, then making sure every product in the range carries them.
And it's why your project stalled. You're not stuck because enrichment is hard. You're stuck the way she was stuck – staring at a wall, with nobody to tell you which three things matter, and stopping because stopping felt safer.
It isn't a tech problem
This isn't a technology problem either. It's an environment problem.
Products come in, and whatever came with them is what they get. No benchmark for depth or quality beyond minimum viability. Has it got a title? A colour? A brand? Has someone touched up the photo? Yes, yes, yes, yes. Onto the site. Next.
Years ago, a trading director at a well-known department store described her mornings to me. Two hundred parcels a day. Unpack, steam, on a model, shoot, write something, create some data, put it on the site. It was a never-ending siege. She was excellent at her job. No version of that day had room for more.
We call this onboarding, which is generous. Onboarding implies a beginning. It's a one-way street to nowhere. Nobody goes back to product data. Not once. Not ever. The catalogue isn't a catalogue anymore. It's where product data goes to die.
Meanwhile IT is measured on deployments and uptime, and trading is measured on commercial outcomes. No one tests discoverability. If it didn't fall over, IT won.
Nobody in that picture is doing a bad job. The environment makes good product data impossible, and then we go looking for a platform to blame.
Three things I'd do this quarter
Pick one category, not the catalogue. The project stalls because you scoped it as everything. Take a single category and answer one question: what are the three or four things that actually decide a purchase here? That's a fortnight's work, not a programme.
Enrich against that answer, not against a template. Most enrichment projects fail because they fill fields rather than answer questions. If an attribute doesn't help somebody choose, it doesn't earn its place. Do the category properly, measure what it does, then use the result to fund the next one.
Stop asking which tool fixes this. Before you sign anything else, ask what the new platform will have to read once it's live. If the answer is the same product data you've got today, you've bought bodywork.
Fix the product data and the score takes care of itself.
Not because enrichment is exciting – it isn't – but because it's the only thing on your roadmap you cannot regret doing well.
And if you're sitting where that retailer was, wanting it but unable to see the first move, that's not a failure of nerve. It's a wall of toilets. Somebody just needs to tell you which three things matter.
Until Tuesday after next.
Warren.
If you'd like to see what this looks like, get in touch, and we'll walk you through it.