In today’s digital marketplace, if your business sells products, managing its information becomes a common challenge. For many businesses, this information becomes difficult to maintain as they scale, leading to unexpected complications that may impact everything from customer satisfaction to operational efficiency.
This data works almost as the backbone of your brand. For example, let’s consider a hypothetical case when a company that scales and acquires more and more product lines begins to notice delays in achieving performance goals.
Every aspect of the business is analyzed, and strategies like new marketing campaigns and sales are implemented. However, metrics don’t improve. It wasn’t until they performed a detailed inspection of the company’s daily activities that they noticed a big obstacle to employees’ daily tasks: time spent searching for information.
Beyond that, they also notice that, since product information is stored using traditional methods like spreadsheets, documents, or even physical paper, data often doesn’t match across their sales channels, forcing their team to spend extra time each day verifying and correcting it.
At the end of the day, the team didn’t have enough time to focus on developing new strategies to drive business growth, and the cycle starts all over again the next day.
Your business doesn’t have to go through this situation if you understand how important your product information is and how to manage it optimally.
In this article, we’ll dive into the risks of manual information management and how to address them.
Error Propagation
Among the most costly errors is inconsistent information across sales platforms. This issue not only takes time from your team but also leads to a loss of trust from your customers.
For example, if your customers search for the same product across three platforms and find different specifications, varying prices, and inconsistent media assets, they will most likely get confused.
In another case, a different customer purchases one of your products, but when it arrives, it doesn’t match the specifications listed on your sales channel. This leads to returns and frustration.
Ultimately, it all affects your brand’s reputation.
Security Vulnerabilities
Your product data security can also be compromised due to poor handling and disorganization. For example, spreadsheets being emailed back and forth between your team and external vendors create a proliferation of sensitive product information. And without centralized storage or access permissions, there’s no way to keep control. You can’t track who made changes, when they were made, or who gave permission to share the file in the first place.
Hidden Costs
Disorganized information often leads to the unnecessary use of valuable resources.
For example, if your team needs to update information on 200 products for a seasonal sale, it may take weeks to do so manually across all your sales channels. Or, on the other hand, the launch of a new product line.
This slows down your time to market, affecting your sales while giving other businesses a competitive advantage.
Or, you might be considering international expansion. In order to achieve this, you’ll need to translate and adapt your product information to new cultures, markets, and languages. Without a centralized system that serves as your single source of truth, that project becomes massive, slow, and costly.
Let’s also remember the customer who returned their product because it didn’t match the description. This generates return shipping costs that affect your revenue.
Scalability Issues
Initially, it is easy to scale with traditional systems like spreadsheets, shared folders, and documents. But as you grow and adopt more products, the number of documents increases, resulting in multiple versions of the same files. Suddenly, you have multiple spreadsheets divided by categories, and your marketing team’s version doesn’t match what sales is using.
This results in long-term scalability issues, as the addition of new sales channels becomes prohibitively labor-intensive, and continued product expansion is unmanageable.
Scalability limitation often becomes apparent at precisely the moment when business growth demands maximum operational efficiency.
It also leads to resource misallocation, where skilled members of your team must dedicate hours to basic organizational troubleshooting, data entry, format conversion, and error correction.
The Systematic Alternative: Product Information Management
To solve these challenges, systems have been developed to centralize all your product information, including descriptions, pricing, specifications, and media assets, syncing and distributing it across all your sales channels.
Now imagine the impact this could have on your business, and what it would allow your team to accomplish.
The Product Information Management (PIM) systems are designed specifically for the complexities of modern product data, allowing you to automate workflow management for content creation and approval, providing comprehensive audit trails and change history, and preventing errors while keeping consistency across platforms.
Several PIM solutions have emerged to address this challenge, with varying approaches and specializations. Platforms like Catsy PIM combine product information management with digital asset management in user-friendly interfaces for business users rather than technical specialists. This system allows you to sync, aggregate, import, and export data from ERP and CRM and then push to your sales channels and/or internal audience.
This has been the solution for thousands of companies around the world, which by implementing these systems have better managed their resources, reacted more quickly to market demands, and had happy customers with their products and services.
So, as the digital commerce landscape continues to evolve, your businesses might need to prepare for scaling with systems that are built to grow with you.
