ETIM is a shared template for describing technical products. Your distributor wants you to fill in a fixed set of specs for each product so their webshop filters actually work. Start with one product. The rest follows.
Your distributor wants structured technical specs so their webshop filters and product comparison actually work. Without that data, your product shows up as a part number and a one-line description. Their customers can't find it. BMEcat is just the file format, think of ETIM as the template and BMEcat as the envelope. Most tools generate it for you.
What ETIM actually is
Three moving parts. That's it.
Your product gets assigned to a class, a category like "Miniature circuit breaker" or "LED panel." That class comes with a fixed list of features: rated current, number of poles, IP rating, tripping curve. You fill in the values from your spec sheets.
Say you make a 16A single-pole circuit breaker. Your spec sheet lists it as "MCB, 1-pole, curve C, 16A, 6kA at 230V." ETIM splits that into separate fields:
| Feature | Value |
|---|---|
| Tripping characteristic | C |
| Rated current | 16 A |
| Number of poles | 1 |
| Voltage rating | 230 V |
| Breaking capacity | 6000 A |
Same information. Different shape. The class defines which fields exist. You supply the values. Every manufacturer filling in the same class uses the same field names, so products become comparable across brands.
There are about 5,600 classes covering electrical, HVAC, building materials, and more. Each class has between 5 and 100+ features, depending on how complex the product is. A circuit breaker has 27. A ceiling luminaire has 117. You won't fill all of them. The important ones are the ones your distributor's customers filter by.
What your distributor sees
Without ETIM data
- SKU: MCB-C16-1P
- Description: "MCB 1P C16 6kA"
- Spec table: empty
- Filters: none match
- Search result: page 8
With ETIM data
- Full spec table: current, poles, curve, voltage, breaking capacity
- Shows up in "16 A" and "Curve C" filter results
- Comparable side-by-side with competing products
- Customers find it
Your distributor isn't asking because they enjoy paperwork. Their customers search by filtering on technical specs, and products without structured data don't show up.
Why it's harder than it should be
Most ETIM resources assume you already have a PIM system or a data team. The official documentation is thorough but written for specialists. The free tools that exist are validators: they check files you don't have yet.
If you're starting from Excel spreadsheets and PDF spec sheets, the on-ramp isn't obvious.
Your spec sheets contain most of what ETIM needs. The gap is translation: your field names don't match ETIM's, your values need reshaping ("16A" becomes "16" in a numeric field with unit "A"), and some features on the ETIM list don't appear in your documentation at all. None of this is hard for a single product. It gets tedious at 500.
Three ways to get it done
Want to see the output first: use a free tool. Upload one product's spec sheet and get back an ETIM classification with features mapped automatically. No ETIM knowledge required. Good for understanding what the result looks like before committing to a bigger effort. Try it here.
Small catalog, under 50 products: do it yourself in Excel. Look up your product class in the free ETIM Viewer, build a spreadsheet, fill in feature values from your spec sheets. ETIM UK publishes free guidance notes by product sector.
Hundreds or thousands of SKUs: manual doesn't scale. Options include specialist agencies, automated classification platforms, or managed services that handle the mapping and validation for you.
Start with one product
- Pick one product, your best seller or most-requested SKU
- Find its ETIM class using the ETIM Viewer or the free classifier
- Fill in the features your distributor's customers would filter by
- Send it to your distributor and ask for feedback
Then reply to the original email:
"Thanks for this. I'm working on getting our data classified to ETIM. Can you let me know which product lines are highest priority so I can start there?"
That single conversation will tell you more than any guide. You'll know exactly what "done" looks like, and you can plan from there.