Creating your online store was probably an exciting and simple process: you selected the e-commerce platform, picked the template that best suited your needs, and uploaded your first products. Then, you could easily picture the highlights, first launches, website design, and sales you would generate.
However, behind the success of running an online store, there are several other requirements, like managing your product information.
Starting with spreadsheets is the easiest way to manage your information, and it works perfectly for a few dozen products. Later, to store your media assets, you created a folder in Google Drive, achieving a fast workflow for yourself and maybe two more people working with you. You scaled, added new sales channels, expanded your product lines, hired more people, and even created departments inside your company: you started to achieve the dream.
But suddenly, you see your dream beginning to stall. It takes your team longer to complete normal daily tasks, you start noticing desynchronization in your product information, some customers complain about receiving products that don’t match the specifications, and you don’t fully understand why it didn’t happen before.
As your product lines grow, more information gets added to your spreadsheets and Google Drive subfolders, and it becomes harder to keep your data organized. It takes your team a long time to upload all this information across sales channels, and doing it manually generates errors. Launches start taking longer, you lose speed-to-market, and your product information doesn’t match across different platforms.
Product management becomes one of the biggest bottlenecks as you grow.
This is a major challenge growing e-commerce businesses face when managing their products, but today, we’ll tell you what solutions other companies have implemented in this field to solve it.
The Reality of Product Management
Product content management will inevitably make the list if we ask different business owners about their biggest challenges running an online store. This happens because each item has descriptions, pricing, specifications, reviews, and media assets that multiply with each new product you add.
You can see this bottleneck in different ways, such as multiple versions of product images with inconsistent naming, specification sheets scattered across emails, cloud storage, and desktops, spreadsheets with conflicting data that no one can reconcile, and teams working off the same documents but using different versions.
Multi-Channel Management
Selling on multiple sales channels allows you to reach greater visibility, which leads to more customers discovering your brand, which is great for scaling.
However, if you have 300 products that need to be uploaded across your website, marketplaces, apps, and more, it becomes a huge bottleneck that consumes your team’s resources.
Remember, each platform has different image size requirements, character count limits, and categorization systems, meaning the format that works for one channel won’t work for another.
Many store owners manually adapt content for each platform, multiplying their workload by the number of sales channels they use.
Seasonal Launches
One of the most important and stressful moments for any online store is when updating products for seasonal sales.
Imagine wanting to update your product names, one by one, across all your sales channels. It could take you weeks to complete, giving your competitors an advantage.
Whether it’s holiday promotions, summer collections, or new product drops, these periods usually involve massive updates across hundreds of listings, temporary promotional pricing that must later be reverted, and new photography and descriptions.
Access to Information
Product information is one of your company’s most valuable data.
It includes the know-how that sets you apart from your competition, the time invested in research and development, and what makes your service unique. That’s why it’s sensitive information that must be handled carefully. Without a permission protocol in place, controlling who can access which information, and without a version history to track who changed what, leaks could happen, hurting your business.
The Solution Big Businesses Implement
Thousands of companies around the world have faced these problems, which have led to the need to develop systems to better manage product information.
Mainly, you can implement a centralized tool that lets you store all your information in one place and distribute it across sales channels from there. Which means that, from one place, you update a product description, and it syncs automatically across every platform.
Moreover, it’s important to have a system that adapts media assets to each platform’s requirements without manual intervention. A version history system is highly useful too, with a permissions protocol that gives access only to the people who need it.
Product Information Management (PIM) systems include all these features and have helped thousands of companies solve problems and scale faster.
One example is Catsy PIM, a system with a friendly interface that enables teams to automate backend product content workflows while maintaining consistency across all sales channels. This saves valuable time, and teams can now invest in strategy and innovation.
Final Thoughts
The path to e-commerce success isn’t just marketing brilliance or finding the perfect products. It’s also about building operational systems that can handle the essential task of managing product content at scale.
If your business is going through growing pains caused by disorganized information, there are solutions you can implement. With the right planning and tools, you can scale your e-commerce operations without all the stress.
