Their sentence, your citation, your customer

Take one supplier description and mark it up in three colours. Attributes are the facts a customer could verify with a tape measure or a label. Claims are the sentences asserting how well it performs, how long it lasts, or how it compares. Instructions are anything telling somebody how to fit, use, maintain or handle it safely.

Each pile has a different rule, which is the entire point of the exercise. Attributes go in as they are, because they answer the questions people ask and they are true or false in a way anybody can settle. Claims get rewritten or attributed. Instructions get taken whole or left out.

Doing this once on a representative product tells you what the feed is mostly made of, and for most catalogues the answer is a surprise: the useful attributes are a short list, and the bulk of the paragraph is claim.

Most claims have a factual core that can be lifted out. A sentence about exceptional battery performance usually sits on a stated capacity or a tested runtime under some condition. Publish the figure and the condition, drop the adjective, and you have a passage that answers the same question and cannot be read as a promise you have no way to stand behind.

Where there is no factual core, the choice is to attribute it in the text or to leave it out. Attribution means a sentence naming the manufacturer as the source of the description that follows, inside the same block, so that any passage carrying the claim also carries whose claim it is.

Compatibility deserves its own decision, because it is the most asked and the most confidently overstated. A supplier saying a part suits a range is describing a family. Your customer is asking about one specific thing they own. Publish the list of what you have actually confirmed and say plainly that anything outside it is unconfirmed rather than letting a broad phrase do the work.

The questions that follow a product question are almost always yours rather than the manufacturer's. What comes in the box. What it costs. What happens if it fails. Who to contact. How it comes back. If those answers are not in the same document as the description, the description is what gets retrieved for them, and the description was written by somebody with a different box, a different warranty and a different phone number.

Write a short block per product, or per range where the answers are identical, and put it directly beneath the borrowed text. It does not need to be elegant. It needs to contain the words included, in the box, warranty, return and contact, because those are the words that will be typed.

Say explicitly where a warranty is administered by the manufacturer rather than by you, and give the route. That single sentence prevents the most reliably expensive misunderstanding in resale, which is a customer who believes they have a claim against the wrong party and has a cited answer saying so.

Borrowed text has no owner by default, which is how a specification stays on a page three revisions after the product changed. Assign the recheck to whoever manages the supplier relationship, on whatever interval matches how often that supplier revises things, and write the date of the last check into the document.

When a feed is reimported, treat it as a new document rather than an update to an old one, and remove the previous version. Two generations of a description differ in their text, so both persist, and both can be retrieved for the same question with nothing to indicate which reflects what you are currently shipping.

This is also the moment to ask whether the whole datasheet belongs in the index or only the part you sell. A manufacturer's document usually covers a range, and the passages describing the variants you do not stock are pure competition for every question about the one you do.

Somebody asks how long the thing lasts, or how much it holds, or whether it will handle a particular job. The strongest passage is the supplier paragraph, because it is the only text you own that addresses performance at all, and it says what marketing copy says. The answer arrives confident and cited. Your business has now made a performance claim it did not write, cannot substantiate and did not know it had published.

The everyday version is duller and more frequent. A customer asks what is included, and the answer lists an accessory from the manufacturer's description of a bundle sold somewhere else. The package arrives without it. Nobody involved has done anything unreasonable: the copy was accurate about a product, just not about the one in your warehouse.

The version that matters most is the trimmed instruction. A safety or installation line that was shortened to fit a product layout, retrieved and quoted as guidance, with the condition that made it safe advice edited out somewhere upstream. This is the one case in this file where the cost of a partial answer is not commercial.