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Issue 039TeardownProduct DataRef 131

The danger of designing around perfect product data

Building commerce systems on the assumption of flawless product data leads to costly customisations, integration failures, and operational bottlenecks. Acknowledge and design for the practical realities of imperfect data from the outset.

Heddwyn Coombs· Creative and Digital Director
4 min readReviewed September 2025
"The most effective commerce systems are built with an understanding that product data will rarely be perfect, and they are designed to manage those imperfections gracefully."
Written by
Heddwyn Coombs, Creative and Digital Director at iWeb
Heddwyn Coombs
Creative and Digital Director
29 years at iWeb

Heddwyn co-founded iWeb and leads creative and digital direction across the agency. Adobe Commerce architect since the Magento 1 era, he writes the strategy notes on platform choice, headless, agentic checkout, AI for commerce and the trade-offs leadership teams hit when modern tooling meets operational reality. Opinionated about data structure, design systems and catalogue size, cautious about unnecessary frontend complexity, and focused on work that stays commercially manageable over time.

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