Where Magento product data breaks at scale

The attribute model is impressive in Magento, it's on of the few platforms that allow you to structure them per product-type. You can show them on product-pages, use them in filters, and with apps leverage them for content generation.

Unfortunately they fall short in long term management. Often the attributes accumulate faster than they are removed - or - they stagnate all together.

Attributes are added for:

• customer requests
• marketplace feeds
• temporary campaigns
• import workarounds

They are rarely cleaned up. Why? Tracking what is useful and relevant is a monumental task, perhaps virtually impossible. So they stay in there and often no longer managed.

Over time:

• naming becomes inconsistent
• scopes are misused
• default values hide missing data
• nobody is fully confident changing anything

At this point, attributes stop being a model and start being a liability.

But also, some teams stop adding attributes all together, even for necessary points. Simply because it's too difficult to analyse the entire catalog and fill out the required values at scale without headaches.

The tools are simply not present in Magento. And that's a shame, end customers rely in this information being present - think buying shirts without knowing the material of measurements. Or needing to enter your product information again and again in marketplaces because the models are not compatible.

Magento’s global / website / store-view scoping is powerful, but brittle when misaligned with how the business actually operates, and even harder to rectify if the business strategy changes. Some common mismatches seen:

• language is treated as a store view, but content ownership is global
• regional overrides are needed, but only partially
• marketplace requirements do not fit any existing scope cleanly
• regional requirments change

To give you a more concrete example, one of our clients has a main website for their country. It has a store, and a few store views with languages. Later on, they decided that a new country should be added. But instead of doing it as a website, it was added as a store.

One year and 100K products later, they realised that they were selling products into the second market that should only be sold in the main country. That means the second country should have been added as a website with it's own store and store views.

This is a hard and expensive issue to come back from on a classic Magento setup.

These kind of problems, teams respond to with:

• manual overrides
• duplicated products
• channel-specific hacks

It not only overcomplicates everything, it becomes the reason why growth stagnates and consistency becomes accidental instead of the norm.

Configurable products work well when variations differ only slightly or are limited in number. But break down when:

• the number of variations exceeds 100 simple products
• variants require rich, distinct content
• marketplaces impose different variation structures (think colour and size, vs colour and style on the same product)
• attributes are reused inconsistently across product families

The admin becomes slow, error-prone, and hard to reason about. Small changes ripple unexpectedly and create for a very unpleasant working space sometimes combated by adding a separate server for the admin-interface only.

At this point, Magento is still capable, but no longer operable at speed, let alone efficiently.

Imports are often introduced to save time. On the surface that's true. But they also become the riskiest operation in the system. Typical symptoms:

• imports are run outside business hours
• rollback plans are unclear or non-existent
• “do not touch” rules emerge
• only one person trusts the process
• timeouts happen during imports
• stores go offline for hours to ensure price consistency
• wrong prices are uploaded

When imports are feared, it's not only data improvement which stops. It's the overall business progress that is halted. That is the much larger issue and comes with an immense cost.

Magento does not enforce ownership. Everyone with access can add, edit, update and delete. At scale, is this something you want? Every intern can remove half of the catalog. A simple bodged export/import can disable your best products, or worse (this happens more than you think).

Without explicit rules:

• marketing edits technical fields
• pricing changes overwrite content
• feeds pull incomplete data
• no one is accountable for quality

The system starts reflecting a big smelly mess.
Remember the age old saying: garbage in...garbage out.

Did you recognise yourself in some of the examples and stories? Or perhaps one of these statements is true:

• people avoid editing product data
• launches slip despite inventory being ready
• imports are fragile or feared
• attributes are “historical artefacts” or are kept in content as bullet points
• one person acts as gatekeeper
• expansion plans stagnate or die

It's very possible your Magento is already under strain! If so, it's well worth investigating if the right PIM system will help you.

Magento breaks not at a single point, but across several interacting weak spots. Once these appear together, recovery inside Magento alone becomes increasingly difficult.

That means the time has come to start looking at a new way of thinking. Call it a shift in minds-set. For context on whether this means you need a PIM, see When you need a PIM for Magento.