Hidden Costs of Disorganized Product Information: What Your Business Might Be Missing
Product information is a key component that aids sales in the digital marketplace. Yet, most growing and thriving businesses undervalue this effort and the cost associated with disorganized product data as they scale.
While the short-term repercussions may seem inconsequential, they could eventually accumulate and impact revenue, operations, and customer experience.
The Increasing Challenge of Product Information
As the number of products increases, so does the information about them: their descriptions, images, pricing, inventory status, and any other related data.
Businesses continue to use the same spreadsheets, shared drives, or PDFs to manage this growing amount of information, and errors begin to appear.
The Real Cost of Disorganization
Wasted Time and Reduced Productivity
It’s estimated that workers spend up to 30% of their day searching for data as a direct result of disorganized ****product information.
For example:
A team member needs to update product information on the website. They check the shared drive only to find three different versions of the same document. Confused, they email his supervisor, who checks with the design team, who eventually verifies with manufacturing. This process takes about three business days, when it could’ve taken 10 minutes.
In other words, this inconvenient process takes productive time from workers, which could’ve been invested in other beneficial activities for the business.
Missed Market Opportunities
For businesses in the digital marketplace, efficient time management is crucial. Having up-to-date, unified information is vital for reacting quickly to new product launches, seasonal offers, or even adapting to new trends.
If your team is delayed by disorganized data, it can also result in slower business expansion and an inability to adapt to competitive pressures. Missed opportunities that directly impact the revenue a company could generate.
Costs Associated with Errors
Inconsistent information inevitably leads to errors. For example, product returns due to inaccurate information result in increased customer service time. In other cases, you may need to reprint marketing materials with incorrect information, or even face compliance risks and potential fines in regulated industries.
Ultimately, these issues directly affect your brand’s reputation, and all of them are caused by a lack of organization in information management.
Scaling Limitations
These drawbacks increase as your company grows. What works for managing 50 products becomes unfeasible for 5,000. That is why scalability in product information management is so relevant for businesses.
Without a scalable product information management tool, companies can stagnate, hindering their efforts to expand. Team members must invest their time in keeping information current, which impedes the search for new opportunities and innovation in the area
Implementing a Systematic Product Information Management Tool
This issue can be solved by implementing a Product Information Management (PIM) system, which helps manage, consolidate, and distribute information through different channels.
Its main purpose is centralization, which allows consistent and up-to-date information to be shared with the entire team, eliminating inefficiencies and errors caused by disorganization.
It also provides workflow automation (smooth processes for updating and approving product content); a clear track of version control; channel integration between websites, marketplaces, catalogs, and retail partners; and enhanced collaboration between departments.
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
As businesses in the digital marketplace grow, they need a scalable structure that allows them to do so.
What begins as a simpler way to manage product information can eventually turn into a growing snowball of disorganized data, hindering regular business processes, slowing down operations, and taking up team resources.
Time is one of our most valuable assets. It’s critical to keep your team aligned and focused on growth, not tied up in repetitive tasks that could’ve been approached better.
By recognizing these obstacles and implementing a PIM tool, you will be driving your business to scale efficiently, while staying competitive, maintaining consistency, and setting your brand up for long-term success.
