Starting your own digital business can be straightforward. First, you research the e-commerce platform that best suits your needs, choose a template, upload your products and descriptions, and voila, your online store is ready to welcome new buyers.
However, when scaling your business, you may notice certain drawbacks that come with growth, many of which weren’t mentioned in business courses.
In this article, we’ll share the most usual obstacles so that you’re better prepared once your business begins to scale.
Product Information Inconsistencies
When you scale, one of the main challenges you face is maintaining consistent information across all your sales channels.
At first, you may only sell on Shopify, but as your business grows, you’ll see opportunities on other marketplaces and platforms. That’s when you stop and realize how long it will take your team to upload all 850 product listings manually, and the process quickly becomes overwhelming.
However, your team gets to work. A few weeks later, you start noticing inconsistencies across platforms: wrong specs, different prices, and customers reaching out to confirm which information is accurate.
This happens because, as your business scales, product information starts getting managed across disconnected systems. Without a centralized solution, any updates you make to your products won’t reflect across all your sales channels, creating a bottleneck that wastes time and affects your team’s productivity.
Digital Asset Management Challenges
Managing images for 12 items is simple. ****You might start with a shared folder and organize it into subfolders by product. But the real challenge begins when you’re handling 450 items. At that scale, finding the right media assets becomes a complicated task.
Without an organizational method, your team ends up investing hours, and inconsistencies start popping up again. It may even become necessary to retake product photos just because the original assets couldn’t be found. It becomes a snowball effect, increasing costs.
The Multi-Channel Formatting Challenge
Each channel you start selling on has unique requirements. For example, Amazon has a specific character limit and bullet point formatting, while your website benefits from longer, more detailed descriptions. Google Shopping may require specific attribute mappings, while social selling channels need content focused on the direct customer benefit of obtaining your product.
Each channel needs to be treated individually. If not, your products could get rejected.
Team Collaboration and Version Control
As your team grows, they begin working on the same spreadsheets and documents, creating a disorganized workspace that lacks version control. The situation continues, and it’s difficult to know who modified the information or when they did it, questioning the accuracy of the information.
Without an organized and established workflow, with clear permission controls for your team members, this task can quickly become complicated.
Inventory Synchronization Problems
Have you ever oversold out-of-stock items because your warehouse inventory wasn’t synced with your website? This happens when your systems operate independently, leading to issues like selling unavailable products or, on the other side, missing out on sales opportunities when in-stock items appear as out of stock.
This also leads to inaccurate forecasting, which negatively impacts your purchasing decisions for supplies.
The Hidden Cost of Information Quality
Inconsistent product information can impact your business in different ways. Customers might return items that don’t match their descriptions, and outdated images can create confusion or hurt the trust in your brand.
In other cases, inconsistent product names can lead to inventory errors, or product launches can be delayed due to the time-consuming process of updating information across different sales channels.
Thousands of businesses around the world have already implemented methods to solve these obstacles.
Depending on the size of your company and the stage it’s in, different product information management methods may apply. If you’ve already moved past the startup phase and spreadsheets or shared folders are no longer enough, implementing purpose-built systems that centralize and automate those workflows may be the best option.
Most successful online sellers eventually implement Product Information Management (PIM) solutions to centralize their product data and digital assets. Specialized systems, like Catsy, create a single source of truth for all product information while automating distribution to various sales channels.
Tools like Catsy include a Digital Asset Management (DAM) system that helps you manage all your product media assets in one centralized place.
Preparing for Sustainable Growth
When it’s time to scale your business, it’s essential to be aware of the challenges that may come up.
Your business and product information is one of your most valuable assets. That’s why having systems in place that allow for consistent updates across platforms is not only helpful for your team, who can invest their time in more valuable tasks for the growth of your company, but also for your customers, who will have greater trust in your brand.
