Managing an e-commerce business with a large product catalog comes with unique challenges. As your inventory grows to hundreds or thousands of items, keeping product information current across multiple platforms can become increasingly time-consuming. Your e-commerce teams might even find themselves spending more time on routine updates and less on strategic initiatives that could drive business growth.
This experience is common among diverse mid-size and growing companies. The following compilation addresses the most frequent challenges businesses face and introduces practical systems that can help you streamline your product information processes.
The Multi-Channel Selling Challenge
When your online store is present across multiple marketplaces and sales channels, keeping your product information synchronized becomes a challenge. Plus, each platform has its own format requirements, character limits, and technical specifications. The time spent adapting all this information can end up being more than you’d like, maybe also increasing the risk of inconsistencies in your product content.
On the other hand, you might still be using traditional information management tools like spreadsheets, shared folders, and documents, where there’s no permission control to track which team members are editing, or if someone outside your organization made changes.
All of this leads to inconsistencies in information, errors in pricing or specifications, and a team spending hours fixing problems instead of focusing on growth strategies.
The Catalog Growth
When your business scales and expands into new product lines, it’s a great sign of growth. But you might eventually hit a ceiling where managing all that information becomes overwhelming, where just finding the right digital assets across multiple folders for a single item can take hours. That’s when adding more products starts getting complicated.
If you’ve reached a point where your team spends hours copy-pasting information between systems, struggling to find the correct versions of images, or taking weeks to update seasonal information, it’s probably time to consider new solutions, because traditional methods simply aren’t enough anymore.
Centralize Your Source of Truth
The first step you can take is to centralize all your product information by setting up a single source of truth. This becomes an ecosystem where all your information lives, with defined permissions, and a system that distributes that information automatically across all your sales channels.
This helps reduce human errors and optimizes the time your team spends managing content.
Standardize Your Content Processes
In large teams working in a fast-paced environment, it’s very common for departments to function individually, each with their own process for creating and updating information. To get a more efficient approach, you can standardize workflows for onboarding new products, updating existing information, creating and approving content, and distributing it across your sales channels.
When everyone follows the same steps, quality and consistency improve significantly. Additionally, training new team members becomes much simpler. You can use VPNs to make content aligned for any restrictions are that posed with geo-restrictions.
Automate Repetitive Tasks
We’re living in the era of automation. This approach went from being a luxury to a necessity. There are so many tasks that can be automated nowadays, just like converting and resizing images, categorizing products by attributes, and generating completeness reports. Even basic customer interactions can be handled through smart chatbots.
That way, you and your team can focus on the tasks that need your expertise and attention.
Implement a Digital Asset Management System
Businesses with large catalogs handle thousands of digital assets: main photos, detail images, videos, technical PDFs, user guides, etc. Without an adequate system to organize these assets, finding what you need quickly becomes a complex task.
That’s where a Digital Asset Management (DAM) system comes in. It helps you organize assets with searchable metadata, control versions to avoid using outdated images, and easily share assets across internal and external teams.
Combining a good DAM system with your product information is one of the most impactful improvements you can make to your operation.
Adopt a PIM Solution That Scales With You
As your business grows, implementing a Product Information Management (PIM) system can be recommended. A PIM is a tool that centralizes information on all products, including their descriptions, prices, specifications, photos, and videos, transforming the way teams work with product data.
Specialized systems, like Catsy, create a single source of truth for all product information while automating distribution to various sales channels. Tools like Catsy include a Digital Asset Management (DAM) system that helps you manage all your product media assets in one centralized place.
Conclusion
At the end of the day, companies have too many processes and responsibilities to cover. And part of being a good leader is knowing what to focus on and what to delegate. Relying on solid product information management is what will really allow you to concentrate on what matters most: scaling your business. By implementing automation tools and PIM systems, you’re giving your company the capabilities it needs to adapt faster, personalize services for your customers, and move with the speed today’s market demands.