What product specifications are essential

The essential plant spec template: pot size, plant height, light, water, pet-toxic, growth, mature size — and how specs feed your filters.

Written By Bas den Hoed

Specifications are the second-most-read element on a plant product page after the photo — and the place where most reseller shops fail. Either nothing is filled in, or everything from the supplier feed is dumped on the page including fields the customer doesn't care about. This article gives you the spec template that actually drives plant purchases, the order they should appear in, and how specs feed your filters.

💡 The most common reseller mistake: taking every spec the supplier provides and showing it verbatim. Not every spec helps the customer buy, and several decisive ones — pet-toxic, light requirement, mature size — are usually missing from supplier feeds entirely. The result: a 22-row spec table that doesn't answer "will it survive in my apartment?"

Why specs do the heavy lifting

For a plant, specs answer the questions a customer asks before they buy: does it fit, will it live, is it safe? Photos answer "is it pretty"; descriptions answer "do I want this in my home"; specs answer the disqualifying questions. Get them wrong or leave them blank, and the customer either bounces or contacts support — both expensive.

Specs also feed every filter on your collection pages. A spec you don't store is a filter you can't offer. See filters and attributes — the link is structural, not editorial. Decide which specs you collect and you've decided which filters you can ever build.

The 7 essential plant specs

Non-negotiable. Every plant product page needs these, in roughly this order:

  1. Pot size — Ø and height. Both. A 12cm pot can be 11cm tall or 14cm tall, and the difference is whether it fits the customer's shelf. Show as Ø12cm × 12cm.

  2. Plant height at delivery. What the customer actually receives, not the eventual height. "60–70cm including pot" is more useful than a vague "medium".

  3. Light requirement. Three buckets: bright direct, bright indirect, low-light tolerant. More granularity is noise — most customers can't tell the difference between "filtered morning sun" and "bright indirect" anyway.

  4. Watering frequency. Express as a range tied to a season: "every 7–10 days in spring/summer, every 14–21 days in winter". Avoid "moderate" — it tells the customer nothing.

  5. Pet-toxic — yes/no. Single most-searched filter for households with cats and dogs. If you don't know, find out — don't omit. A wrong "no" can land you in a customer-service nightmare; "Unknown" is honest and acceptable.

  6. Growth speed. Slow / moderate / fast. Buyers picking a statement plant want fast (Monstera, Ficus); buyers picking for a fixed shelf space want slow (most succulents, Sansevieria).

  7. Mature size. The realistic indoor maximum, not the Wikipedia figure. A Monstera Deliciosa indoors caps around 2.5m — not the 20m it reaches in the rainforest.

Valuable optional specs

Not every plant needs all of these, but they earn their place when relevant. Limit yourself to at most 12 optional specs across your catalog — beyond that, the spec table becomes wallpaper.

  • Country of origin — buyers increasingly check (Netherlands-grown vs imported).

  • Organic / pesticide-free certification — if you have it, show it.

  • Scent — for plants where it matters (Jasmine, Stephanotis, Lavender). Customers shopping by scent want this front-and-centre.

  • Flowering colour and season — only relevant for flowering plants; useless field for a Sansevieria.

  • Air-purifying — flag the NASA list plants where the marketing is genuinely supported.

  • Difficulty — beginner / intermediate / advanced. Cuts down on bad-fit purchases.

  • Humidity preference — relevant for tropicals (Calathea, Maranta, Alocasia).

The data hygiene problem

Supplier feeds give you specs in inconsistent units. Pot size shows up as cm, inch, or litres depending on the grower. Plant height is sometimes "with pot", sometimes "from soil". Light requirement is a free-text field one supplier writes as "halfschaduw" and another as "bright indirect, no direct sun".

You cannot show this raw on the customer-facing page. Three rules:

  • Normalise on import. Centimetres only. One vocabulary for light (three values). One format for watering (range + season). Build this once, apply to every supplier feed.

  • "Unknown" beats fake "0". If a supplier didn't supply pet-toxicity, the spec value is "Unknown — please consult our support". Don't default to "no" because the field is required and zero felt safer.

  • Audit before publish. Look at the rendered spec table on the product page, not the back-end. A field that looks fine in a database row can render as 200,00 when the locale is wrong.

How to display specs on the page

Spec table beneath the hero photo and price block, above the long-form description. Two columns: label, value. No icons unless they actually help — a thermometer icon next to "humidity" is decoration, not information.

  • Order by decision-relevance, not alphabetically. Pot size and height first, light and water second, pet-toxic third. The customer should be able to disqualify the plant by reading the first three rows.

  • Don't fold specs into the description paragraph. "This Monstera comes in a 12cm pot, requires bright indirect light, and is mildly toxic to pets" is unscannable. The same data in a table is read in 3 seconds.

  • Mobile: collapse less-critical specs behind a "show more" — but never hide the 7 essentials.

Specs to filters — the structural link

Each spec in your table is a candidate filter on the collection page. The mapping is direct:

  • Pot size → "Pot size" filter (range or buckets).

  • Light requirement → "Light" filter (3 values).

  • Pet-toxic → "Pet-friendly" filter (yes only — never filter for the toxic ones).

  • Mature size → "Plant size" filter (small/medium/large/XL).

  • Difficulty → "Care level" filter.

Run the same vocabulary in both. If your spec table says "bright indirect" but the filter says "indirect light", customers can't connect the two. See filters and attributes for the filter-side of this — the two articles are deliberately tightly coupled.

⚠️ If you don't store it, you can't filter on it. Adding a filter retroactively means backfilling spec data across hundreds of products. Decide your spec template before you publish 100+ SKUs, not after.

Next action

Open one of your top-selling plant pages and audit it against the 7 essentials above. Count how many are filled, how many are blank, and how many are present but in the wrong unit (litres instead of cm, "moderate" instead of a watering range). That count is your starting backlog. Fix the top 20 products first — your top 20 deliver most of your revenue and most of your customer-service load. Once the spec template is solid, the next pieces are product descriptions for the long-form copy and filters and attributes to expose the specs as filters on collection pages.