What Is ETIM, and Why Are Your Biggest Customers Asking for It?

Sooner or later it happens: a distributor, a major retailer, or a customer’s procurement team asks for “your ETIM data.” And nearly every manufacturer who hasn’t gone through the process might respond with “right… let me get back to you on that.”

Manufacturers, distributors, and retailers already juggle a multitude of standardized data formats. ETIM is the strange one in the pile, and its strangeness is the reason so many programs stall before they start: there are no required fields. ETIM sets constraints on the data you provide: datatypes, units, allowed values. The standard tells you how to say things, not what you must say. What actually matters gets decided by your trading partners, and ultimately by whether a contractor searching a distributor’s webshop can find your product.  

What is ETIM, exactly?

ETIM is an open, free-to-use international standard for classifying technical products. It began in 1991 as a project of the Dutch electrical installers’ association, became a formal international organization in 2008, and today spans member organizations in more than 20 countries. The current release, ETIM 10.0 (December 2024), defines more than 5,600 product classes across the electrical, HVAC/plumbing, building materials, tools, and marine sectors.

The model is simple on purpose. Every product type is a class. Every class carries a fixed set of features (its technical characteristics), and every feature has defined values and units.

The crucial part: every class, feature, value, and unit has a language-independent code (meant to save you the headache of translation).

Classify a copper patch cord once, and a wholesaler in Rotterdam, a distributor in Lyon, and an electrician in Texas all read the same data natively. Same codes, different words. Europe’s “protective hose” is America’s “conduit,” and the code doesn’t care what you call it.

One clarification saves most of the confusion I see: ETIM is not a database, not a PIM, and not product content. ETIM is the grammar. Your PIM holds the words. The exchange file your partners receive is the envelope. Keep those three layers separate and almost everything else about ETIM gets easier to reason about.

Why now, and why North America

Europe has run this playbook for three decades, and ETIM-classified data is table stakes with major European distributors and data pools across the Electrical, HVAC/Plumbing, Building Materials, and Tools & Hardware sectors. Instead of answering hundreds of one-off spreadsheet requests, a manufacturer delivers one classified, validated catalog to a data pool, and the whole channel can pull from there.

North America is the current frontier. ETIM North America (founded in 2020) is translating the model into American English, French Canadian, and Mexican Spanish, with more than 2,500 classes reviewed and finalized for the North American market so far. One momentum signal is worth noting. IDEA, the electrical industry’s data platform owned by NEMA and NAED, rejoined ETIM North America in October 2024. Member rolls now include manufacturers like ABB, Eaton, Legrand, and Schneider Electric, and distributors like Graybar, WESCO, and Sonepar.

B2B buying keeps moving online, where purchases are won by structured, filterable attributes rather than PDF spec sheets. Simultaneously, European sustainability regulation is entering its Digital Product Passport era, which will make machine-readable, standardized product data a compliance asset. ETIM’s newest exchange format already carries environmental and packaging data fields.

Adopting ETIM doesn’t check those boxes by itself, but it positions your product data for a world that increasingly demands them.

What we’ve learned actually doing this

Sitation recently designed and built an end-to-end ETIM syndication pipeline for a global electrical manufacturer, taking product data from their PIM through to validated, standards-compliant catalog files. Here’s what the brochures don’t tell you:

• It’s 90% a data problem and 10% a pipe problem. Generating the file is engineering; deciding what goes in it is the project. The mapping decisions, gap analysis, and data governance took months of collaboration. The pipeline itself came together in weeks. Budget your energy accordingly.
• Scope to the classes you actually sell. Of ETIM’s 5,600+ classes, a real catalog may only touch a few dozen. Trying to stare down the entire standard produces what I call the column problem. You end up with a readiness spreadsheet hundreds of attribute columns wide, and no human being can review that and stay sane. Reducing the number of classes you are serving cuts the effort needed.
• Start with your single biggest class. For datacom manufacturers, that’s usually copper patch cords, which can approach half the catalog by SKU count. Learn the pattern on that class’s twenty-odd features, then repeat it. The decision framework never changes.
• Every feature has exactly four outcomes. Map it directly from an existing PIM property. Transform it (feet to meters). Default or derive it (if every product in the line uses the same connector, set it once). Or leave it blank. And the principle that anchors all four: blank is better than wrong. ETIM explicitly permits unknown values. Wrong values burn distributor trust, and trust doesn’t recover on your enrichment schedule. You can always fill gaps later.
• A handful of features do most of the work. For a patch cord, roughly five features drive the overwhelming majority of search-and-filter value on a distributor site: category, length, color, connector, and cable type. Prioritize like a merchandiser, not an archivist.
• AI accelerates; product experts decide. We used AI to fuzzy-match PIM properties to ETIM features and to draft provisional class assignments, and it gives projects a real head start. But the client’s product managers validated, corrected, and owned every mapping. There is no substitute for someone who actually knows your catalog.  

How ETIM data gets delivered: BMEcat

Even perfectly mapped data has to leave the building in the right envelope. In most ETIM markets today, that envelope is BMEcat, an XML catalog format that partners exchange according to ETIM’s published guideline. Most PIM platforms, including the ones North American manufacturers typically run, don’t produce a compliant, validated ETIM BMEcat file out of the box. That’s the gap ETIM for FUSE closes.  

BMEcat today, ETIM xChange tomorrow

ETIM published the final major version of its BMEcat guideline in 2021. The format is feature-frozen, maintenance updates continue, and it remains what most trading partners accept today. Its successor, ETIM xChange, is JSON-based: version 1.0 arrived in February 2024, and version 2.0 landed in November 2025 with sustainability and packaging-regulation data built in.

Supporting xChange only means adding an output module, and the mapping work carries over untouched. The same goes for ETIM versions themselves. The application imports any official ETIM release, so moving from ETIM 10 to a future ETIM 11 is a dictionary refresh and an impact review.  FUSE can support both formats natively.  

Three takeaways

1. Stop asking what’s required. Ask what your buyers filter on and what your trading partners actually use.
2. Blank is better than wrong. Coverage grows over time; trust doesn’t recover quickly.
3. Validate before you deliver, every time. BMEcat and the newer ETIM xChange format each ship with an official schema (XSD and JSON Schema, respectively), so you can prove a file is valid before you send it. 
   

If a distributor, data pool, or customer just asked you for ETIM data, that’s a sign your products are worth finding. Sitation helps manufacturers assess ETIM readiness, map their catalogs, and automate standards-compliant delivery from Salsify and other PIM platforms. Talk to us about an ETIM readiness assessment.

FAQ

• What does ETIM stand for? ETIM Technical Information Model. It’s an open international standard for classifying technical products.
• Is ETIM mandatory? No. It’s an open standard, and adoption is driven by trading partners, distributors, and data pools. In some European markets, they already expect it.
• What does BMEcat stand for? Bundesverband Materialwirtschaft, Einkauf und Logistik Catalog (in English: German Association of Supply Chain Management, Procurement and Logistics).
• What’s the difference between ETIM and BMEcat? ETIM classifies the data (classes, features, values, units). BMEcat is an XML format for exchanging it. ETIM xChange is the JSON-based successor for ETIM data exchange. The transition is gradual, and both are in use today.
• Is ETIM free to use? Yes. The classification model is free. Membership in a national ETIM organization adds tooling, support, and a voice in the model’s development.