Scaling on Shopify: Why Product Information Is Key for Growt

Why Product Information Is Key for Growth

Shopify has democratized e-commerce by making it easy for brands, retailers, and entrepreneurs to launch an online store. Shopify provides an intuitive suite of tools to track inventory, process payments, and ship products, bringing a solid structure for anyone who wants to enter the digital marketplace.

Shopify allows merchants to add products, upload their media assets and descriptions easily, which perfectly suits businesses with not too many items. However, when stores scale to hundreds of products, the updating process becomes more complicated and time consuming, leading to different challenges. Tasks that used to be easy and fast to execute suddenly becomes a bottleneck, taking days instead of hours, delaying the team and the business goals.

Manual Product Updates Small brands with few products might take only a couple of hours to update prices and descriptions, but when businesses scale to hundreds or thousands of items, the same update could take weeks to complete. Team members are not only updating text, but also syncing product specs, images, and pricing across every channel. This situation leads to information clutter, which eventually generates errors, launch delays, scaling limitations, and associated costs.

Inconsistency in Product Information

If multiple team members are responsible for updating information, it’s common to have inconsistencies in tone and structure. This can affect your brand’s voice and customer perception. Discrepancies between product pages and marketing materials confuse customers, generating a feeling of distrust, especially when specs don’t match what’s delivered.

Digital Assets Management

Managing multiple images and videos per product can get messy. Unfortunately, since Shopify’s media library is basic, it lacks features for organization. That’s why using a tool that supports metadata tagging and version control can help you scale more efficiently. Without a dedicated asset manager, it’s easy to lose track of which file is current, leading to incorrect uploads and outdated product visuals.

Muti-channel Expansion

To achieve greater reach, merchants can diversify their sales channels; so products can be listed on marketplaces like Amazon and Walmart. They would need to update information manually across different sales channels for the same products, which can lead to inconsistencies. Since each platform has its own format and requirements, manually meeting them all quickly becomes unmanageable.

Hidden Costs of Manual Product Information Management

Although it might not be visible at first, product disorganization leads to unnecessary expenses, such as product returns due to incorrect specifications, reprinting marketing materials with incorrect information, or facing compliance risks and potential fines in regulated industries.

Time’s another resource being consumed. Employees can spend up to 30% of their workday searching for product information in shared files, documents, and PDFs. Prices start to vary here and there, in catalogs, on Shopify, across every sale channels, generating drawbacks. This chain reaction continues across departments.

As a result, the business’s growth is affected. Members invest their resources in maintaining information rather than strategy creation and innovation. This transforms into time and talent lost on repetitive tasks instead of being used to improve products, customer experience, or marketing strategy.

The solution

If you relate to the above, you're not alone. Businesses of all sizes, industries, and countries have experienced this issue for years, trying to solve it with outdated methods. However, thanks to technology, there is a better approach to this situation.

Nowadays there are Product Information Management (PIM) systems, tools designed for the centralization of information. These solutions offer multiple advantages for businesses in the digital marketplace.

PIMs have a centralized structure that allows them to store information, specifications, prices, and even media for all their products, facilitating access to accurate information for any team member at any time.

Their technology implements a formal approval workflow, which helps maintain the quality of the information and enables version control.

Having all the information centralized allows the distribution to sale channels. ****This eliminates the need to manually update each product on different portals. Instead, you can perform a single update from the PIM.

This process eliminates inconsistencies and team members from different departments can now work simultaneously. The result is faster workflows, fewer errors, and a more aligned team working off the same page.

There are different PIM tools available on the market. One of the highest-ranked is Catsy, a PIM solution that facilitates information management and reduces time to market by up to 75%.

Conclusion

Implementing systematic solutions is the secret of Shopify online stores scaling smoothly. As your business grows, your competitive advantage increasingly depends not just on what you sell, but on how efficiently you manage, update, and distribute your product information across a growing ecosystem of sales channels and customer touchpoints.

Therefore, making the decision to implement a PIM is a strategic initiative that can lead your business to greater productivity, improved customer service, and scalability.