In E-commerce new sales channels such as selling through distributors, and marketplaces is continuing to gain traction. Along with that customer expectations are on the rise, and digital competition is growing every day. To stay competitive, brands must go beyond offering great products, creating seamless, consistent shopping experiences across every touchpoint.
A big part of that experience is product content. From specs and images to videos and documentation, product information plays a central role in how users make purchase decisions. This has become a key driver of conversion, trust, and brand reputation. But as businesses grow and SKUs multiply, managing this content becomes increasingly complex.
This article explores why product content matters more than ever, why managing it has become a challenge for so many eCommerce teams, and what tools leading brands are using to solve it at scale.
The Reality of Product Content
Product content is one of your most valuable assets. It acts as both sales material and a source of truth for buyers. Modern online shoppers expect complete information, including detailed descriptions, accurate specifications, and rich media assets, before deciding to make a purchase.
This situation has increased over time, becoming a priority for many e-commerce businesses.
Nowadays, product pages are more nourished than ever, competing for users’ attention. It’s increasingly common to implement dynamic resources, such as lifestyle images, reviews, extensive technical descriptions, and even tutorial videos on how to use the items. However, providing this amount of information has become a management bottleneck.
For small businesses with a few dozen products, storing and organizing product data in spreadsheets, PDFs, or shared folders is more than enough. However, as businesses grow, it becomes increasingly challenging to maintain the same information storage methods.
Consider the case of a company that scaled and now owns several hundred products. For each, it must store prices, specifications, materials, media assets, color variants, and more data. This increases the number of Google Drive shared folders. More spreadsheets are generated, and multiple documents begin to be stored in email threads.
As time goes on, the number of team members also increases. Each member begins to add and modify information. Eventually, there is no centralized source of data, and managing product information becomes a tedious project.
Although the consequences of information disorganization are not immediately apparent, they begin to manifest in several ways:
The Multi-Channel Challenge
New sales channels like marketplaces, e-commerce platforms, apps, and retail partners are created every so often, offering more opportunities to showcase products to a bigger audience.
To avoid missing out, your team will need to manually add information for hundreds of products across touchpoints. This means checking each spreadsheet, PDF, and catalog, reviewing shared folders for media assets, and verifying with other departments that the information is up-to-date.
This process can take weeks, but it also opens the door to errors and inconsistencies, such as wrong specs, mismatched images, or incorrect product materials.
User Dissatisfaction:
When errors are generated across platforms, users are the first ones to be affected.
For example, they might get confused about the veracity of the data presented on different channels, increasing the time your team spends resolving their questions through customer service channels. In other cases, it can also incur return costs if items don’t meet the specifications described when received.
Without a single source of truth, maintaining a unified inventory becomes a challenge, potentially resulting in out-of-stock product sales. Ultimately, this situation might impact the brand’s reputation.
Slow Speed-To-Market:
The speed at which your products reach the market may also be delayed due to the number of items required to be uploaded. This impacts your company’s competitive advantage, as sales opportunities are reduced every day your products are not in sales channels.
The Solution Big Businesses Implement
These are some of the challenges e-commerce businesses face when offering large quantities of products. However, new specialized tools have been developed to solve them.
Product Information Management (PIM) systems are designed to manage information through data centralization, working specifically well for a large number of products.
These systems work as a storage hub for descriptions, specifications, materials, and prices, but also allow you to manage images, videos, and documents thanks to the integration of a Digital Asset Management (DAM) tool.
This way, you can link your product information directly to assets, greatly simplifying the search, update, and management process of information.
Once this data is unified, it can be distributed across all your sales channels: simply update the information once, and it will be automatically reflected across all your platforms.
One of these solutions is Catsy, a PIM/DAM system that facilitates information management, functioning as a single source of truth. Catsy adapts to the information you need to manage, offering a fully customizable platform. Moreover, its DAM system allows media assets to be adapted to the requirements of each sales channel, facilitating your team’s work.
Final Thoughts
Implementing specialized tools when managing your product information on a large scale brings great benefits. First, you’ll be able to offer your customers a better shopping experience. You’ll also generate more trust by providing unified information, regardless of the channel you sell through.
In addition, your internal teams will work more efficiently by reducing manual tasks and eliminating version control issues, freeing up time to focus on growth initiatives.
By implementing better product information management tools, your company’s reputation will benefit, and you’ll scale more efficiently.
