Catalog management is one of the biggest headaches for sales, marketing and the commercial area, because it is almost always done manually and is nearly impossible to keep up to date. When product data is scattered and outdated, customers cannot find what they are looking for and the company loses sales to competitors with clearer information.
Imagine the commercial director of an industrial distributor preparing the launch of a new product line. The price list lives in a spreadsheet maintained by one analyst, the technical data sheets are in PDF files prepared by the supplier, the website has descriptions written two years ago and the sales team prints a quarterly catalog that is already outdated when it comes out. An important customer asks about the availability of a model and receives three different answers from three different areas. Nobody made a mistake on purpose. The problem is that there is no single place where the truth about each product lives.
As customer experience consultants, we have talked with a large number of companies of every size and industry. From those conversations it emerges that catalog management is a common topic that gives sales, marketing and commercial managers big headaches. The main reason is that catalog administration is done manually, which makes it almost impossible to keep it up to date. This article describes the most frequent challenges, what it costs not to solve them and how leadership should approach them.
From countless conversations with companies, we understood that the biggest challenges faced by marketing, sales and commercial managers are six. Each seems manageable on its own, but together they explain why so many catalogs end up outdated.
Manufacturers, distributors and resellers, depending on the type of products they sell and where they sell them, must continually update their product codes or SKUs. The reasons are constant price changes, lists of new products, inventory variations and other causes. As a result, they can end up devoting a significant amount of time and resources to adjusting every asset where the products are available, time that could be spent on marketing, operations and, of course, customers.
There are other implications. A printed catalog is impossible to keep current and its associated cost is very high. If the catalog is in PDF or another digital format, in most cases it depends on third parties, so it does not allow agile changes either.
Like the catalog, promotions and discounts are handled periodically and present the same challenges. When they are published in printed material, they are expensive and hard to keep up to date. On top of that comes the challenge of differentiating them by customer category. For all these reasons, in many cases promotions are used less than the company would like. To see how they are configured on a modern platform, you can consult the article on how to create a catalog price rule in Adobe Commerce.
Any company that sells through two or three channels generally agrees that one of its biggest challenges is publishing its products simultaneously and managing them according to the type of customer. Each channel has its own requirements for how products, prices and availability must be included. If you add to this an eCommerce channel of your own and marketplaces such as Amazon, eBay, Walmart.com or Mercado Libre, the challenge is greater, because each has different product categories. The way a product is presented on Amazon should not be the same as the way it is presented on your own site or in the sales team's catalog.
When it is published the same everywhere, it is common to end up with incomplete or confusing listings. Products could even end up in the wrong category, which prevents meeting customer expectations, makes it harder for them to find the item and, if they find it, does not give them the confidence that they are buying exactly what they want. In that case, they are likely to buy from the competitor. Most merchants understand the importance of adapting their listings to each channel, but many do not do so because they lack an effective way to manage several listings for the same product. Those who try waste many hours on disorganized data, delay getting their products to market and generate errors. To broaden the picture of channels, see what a marketplace is and how it differs from a B2B eCommerce store.
When the catalog is already a management challenge and in many cases a disaster, it is very difficult to add new SKUs. To do so, it would be necessary to go back and clean up the existing ones, which makes any update challenging. The company may not have the resources or the time to solve this kind of problem, and data debt grows with every new product.
Most of the challenges above affect the availability of up-to-date information. It is hard to keep data current when you must update the catalog, work with suppliers and publish on multiple channels. The result is products with spelling errors, missing information, and incorrect descriptions or attributes. When large numbers of SKUs are managed in Excel or any non-specialized digital platform, it is overwhelming to establish and maintain a consistent standard. Without the right tools, the company depends on employees making bulk changes and updates, which can easily lead to human error. Most merchants end up publishing products with missing and inconsistent information.
Today's customers have high expectations regarding product information. They demand accurate, high-quality data that gives them the details they need to assess the purchase. To meet that need, merchants must devote a great deal of time to preparing their product data for the customer, enriching it with multiple attributes, handling price management and offering detailed descriptions. A distributor that works with products from multiple brands, or a manufacturer with multiple lines, receives data from different sources, and that makes it difficult to keep the information on all products up to date for customers.
The quality of product data is not an internal matter; it directly affects sales and reputation. The Syndigo study The State of Product Content 2024, conducted by YouGov in April 2024 with 6,480 adults in the United States, France, Germany and the United Kingdom, shows the size of the problem. Fifty percent of respondents had abandoned a potential purchase, online or in store, in the previous six months because they could not find enough product information, and 83% said they would probably leave a site that did not offer complete product content. In addition, 35% had returned a product that did not meet their expectations based on the content they reviewed before buying, and 73% would think worse of a brand after finding incomplete or incorrect information.
These figures come from a consumer survey and not from the sales of a specific company, but leadership asking whether it is worth investing in organizing its catalog finds a clear answer in them. Every incomplete listing is a lost sales opportunity, and every erroneous listing is a return or a complaint to come.
Most companies do not have a centralized place where they can see, administer and manage all the data of the products they handle. In many cases there are several spreadsheets circulating through different departments, eCommerce products live only on the eCommerce platform, traditional product data is in Excel or an ERP system, and there are printed catalogs and PDF files that become outdated.
Without a designated place to centralize this management, companies struggle to have a single view of product data. That creates quality problems, makes it difficult to include products on several channels and makes it complicated to search for and update products in the different places where they are stored. The consequence is not only operational. A company that does not know which is the correct version of its own catalog cannot automate, personalize or measure.
Adobe's best-practices guide for Adobe Commerce offers a valuable clue about design. It recommends managing product information through an external product management system and storing there the attributes that are not related to commerce, and it warns that configuring too many attributes or attribute options can affect performance. It also suggests using different attribute sets for each product type, instead of a generic template, and minimizing the number of searchable attributes, according to its catalog management planning guide.
Beyond the tool, the logic is one of governance. There must be an owner for each data point, a single source from which it is distributed to the channels, quality rules that are validated before publishing and a process for onboarding new products without going through a massive cleanup every time. To complement the approach from a pricing point of view, see how to segment your catalog for a better pricing strategy.
Moving from a scattered catalog to a centralized one rarely happens all at once. It is best to advance in stages. First the data model is defined, that is, which attributes describe each product type and which are mandatory. Then the information of a pilot line is cleaned and consolidated, loaded into the chosen platform and connected to one or two channels. Only after validating the result is it extended to the rest of the catalog and to the other channels. This approach reduces risk, generates learning and makes it possible to show early benefits that sustain leadership support. It also helps the commercial team, which knows the errors of the current catalog better than anyone, to take part in the design and become an advocate for the change instead of resisting it.
It is also worth setting indicators from the beginning. Four are enough to start: the percentage of products with a complete listing, the time it takes for a new product to reach all channels, the number of price or availability errors detected per week and the hours of manual work devoted to the catalog. With that data, the company can demonstrate the return on investment and prioritize the next improvements.
For the CEO, the catalog is a data asset and must be managed as such. The customer experience, the ability to sell on new channels and the speed with which a launch reaches the market all depend on it. A company with a disorganized catalog has a hidden brake on its growth, because every new channel or new line multiplies the manual work.
For the commercial director, the priority is that sales, marketing and service work with the same information, and that price and availability changes reach all channels at once. For the marketing director, the catalog is the raw material for content, SEO and campaigns. For the chief technology officer, it is a data architecture problem that must be solved with an appropriate platform and not with more spreadsheets. And for the chief financial officer, it is a source of hidden costs, such as hours of manual work, returns due to erroneous information and sales that did not materialize.
The cultural aspect also counts. Centralizing a catalog means that some areas give up control of their files, and that generates resistance. Leadership must sponsor the change, define clear owners and explain why the company gains by having a single version of the truth.
Bring together sales, marketing, operations and technology and take an inventory of where product information lives today. List every spreadsheet, every system, every printed catalog and every PDF, and note who maintains it and how often. In an hour you will have a map of the problem. Then choose a high-volume product category and measure how much of its data is complete, how much contradicts itself across channels and how many weekly hours its updating consumes. That diagnostic will serve to justify the investment.
With the diagnostic in hand, evaluate platform options with business criteria and not only technical ones. The ICX tool selection enablement toolkit offers a methodology for comparing technology alternatives, so that the choice responds to the needs of your operation and to its ability to integrate with existing systems.
Catalog management is complex and highly specialized, so it is advisable to rely on experts who guide the process and help choose the best platform. ICX Consulting supports companies in designing their product data and eCommerce strategy, from diagnosis to implementation on platforms such as Adobe Commerce. Its B2B eCommerce practice and its B2C eCommerce practice cover the most frequent sales models, and the omnichannel platform connects the catalog with every customer touchpoint.
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An ICX Consulting consultant will work with you to analyze where your organization stands today and which decisions can move your commercial and customer experience results.
It is the set of processes and tools for creating, enriching, maintaining and publishing product information, such as descriptions, attributes, prices, images and availability, across all sales channels.
Because it does not provide a quality standard, version control or distribution to multiple channels. With large numbers of SKUs, manual work increases errors and makes it hard to keep information consistent across channels.
No. Each channel and each marketplace has its own categories and requirements, and the listing must be adapted to them and to the type of customer. What matters is to start from a single data source and derive the versions for each channel.
Fewer hours of manual work, fewer errors, faster launches and a better customer experience. According to Syndigo, incomplete information leads many buyers to abandon the purchase or to think worse of the brand.
It depends on the number of products, the quality of the starting data and the number of channels. That is why it is recommended to start with a pilot line, measure the result and extend the model in stages, instead of promising a single date for the entire catalog.
An organized catalog is the foundation of any digital sales strategy and of every new channel the company wants to open. If you want to know how much its manual management costs you today and how to move to a centralized model, request a diagnostic with an ICX consultant and turn your catalog into a competitive advantage.