By Max Schrevelius, Co-founder / Commercial Director
Accelerating e-commerce growth with strong product data management.
E-commerce teams are under constant pressure to deliver growth. Eventually, the potential of your current product range reaches its limit. To keep expanding, you might look at broadening your assortment or entering new sales channels. When you scale these efforts, your product data becomes a critical success factor.
Online spending continues to rise steadily. As a result, e-commerce managers are facing higher targets than ever before. To meet them, two primary growth strategies usually come into play:
The foundation: product master data.
Product master data refers to the essential information used to categorise, register, and trade a product. This includes article numbers, classifications, supplier information, availability status, and pricing.
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Long tail: When you commit to a large-scale strategy, you need to automate the onboarding of long tail products. Without automation, your team will spend a vast amount of time on repetitive manual tasks processing expansions and updates. Think of price changes, stock availability, or adding new items. Manually managing hundreds, or even thousands, of products is a never-ending task. Because these updates occur daily, you must automate the flow using product master data.
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Smarter selling: Manually maintaining hundreds of products across various marketplaces is a full-time job. You need to ensure availability is constantly updated to prevent backorders, add or remove products, and keep your pricing competitive while protecting your margins. The key to managing this complexity lies in automating your product master data flow.
How does ConnectingTheDots help in managing product data?
ConnectingTheDots provides a PIM platform that centralises data, automates workflows, and offers robust integration capabilities. Additionally, the Import & Onboarding component facilitates the fast and accurate import of product data from various source systems.
Growing with business logic.
To achieve rapid and efficient online growth with long tail products, you need to apply business logic to your assortment to save your team time. In other words, you want to set rules in your system that automatically process updates based on data provided by suppliers. At a minimum, you should automate changes in availability and the addition of replacement products. This not only claws back significant time but also reduces the risk of errors and ensures your listings are always current.
You can take this further by automatically calculating retail prices. Adjustable pricing rules can be incredibly beneficial: for example, apply a 2.5% markup to brand X within product group Y, and a 4.2% markup to brand A in product group B, rounding to a clean price like £99.95. This allows your team to focus manual fine-tuning only on the products where it truly adds value. If you operate in an industry with many distributors and overlapping assortments, you can also use automation for deduplication. By tracking multiple suppliers for a single product, business rules can automatically determine which supplier takes priority based on price and availability.
Marketplaces.
When selling high volumes through various marketplaces or shop-in-shop constructions, automating through product master data is essential. Use business logic to publish specific product ranges to a marketplace, update items that are no longer available, or schedule weekend promotions for specific brands. Automation also allows you to push price updates to all marketplaces simultaneously, ensuring consistency and speed.
Automating product master data pays off.
If you are serious about expanding your current range with a long tail assortment or seeking More sales channels, you must consider automating your product master data. It pays off by freeing up time for high-value tasks, such as improving SEO findability or enriching product content to increase conversion rates. These are the areas where e-commerce professionals should be spending their energy.
Focusing on actual trade is far more rewarding than manual data entry. You can achieve this with a Product Information Management system that is designed not just for commercial content like images and descriptions, but specifically for automating master data like price and availability. While master data might sound technical, it is the engine that drives e-commerce revenue growth.
Learn more: More sales channels.
More on e-commerce growth product data
In practice, focusing on e-commerce growth product data ensures that information becomes available faster and more consistently. By centralising your product data strategy, you reduce the risk of errors and accelerate your time-to-market. A structured approach makes your organisation more scalable and future-proof.
To get the most out of e-commerce growth product data, start small and build your processes step by step. A governed workflow proves that e-commerce growth product data becomes truly scalable when it is managed correctly. Let your product data flow.
Can a PIM system shorten my time-to-market?
Yes, absolutely. By centralising and streamlining the product information management process, including the automation of data entry and publication to various channels, a PIM platform significantly reduces the time required to launch new products online.