The Definitive Guide to Product Catalog Management

How to set up your PIM for success

Product Catalogue Management (PCM) has evolved from an administrative data task to a strategic programme that directly impacts sales, compliance, and overall customer experience. As we enter 2026, companies face several challenges: the EU Digital Product Passport is becoming mandated, rising marketplace rejection rates average 20-25% for first submissions, and the need to maintain consistent product data across multiple selling channels while producing print catalogues that can still drive around a quarter of B2B buying decisions.

This guide provides actionable frameworks for organisations managing anywhere between a few thousand and hundreds of millions of SKUs across online and print channels. We'll explore how modern PCM systems reduce time-to-market, drastically cut catalogue production costs, and achieve an average marketplace acceptance rate of around 99% when properly implemented. More critically, we'll address the regulatory changes approaching with GDPR compliance and the technical requirements for maintaining GS1 GDSN certification while automating workflows for extensive catalogues in multiple languages.

Defining Product Catalogue Management

Product Catalogue Management encompasses the organisation, enrichment, governance, and distribution of product information across all customer touchpoints, digital marketplaces, ecommerce platforms, websites, mobile apps, print catalogues, and B2B procurement systems. 

Unlike simple database management, PCM involves managing complex technical attributes, parent-child relationships, product variants, categories & sub-categories, related products, marketing content, digital assets, pricing matrices, regulatory documentation, and channel-specific transformations.

Let’s discuss this in more detail

1. Categories and Sub-categoriess

Categories can be thought of as groupings of similar products. For example, if you’re looking for bathroom products, you may browse the bath category, but you might be interested in a specific sub-category, such as a corner bath. Well-designed categories can help your users easily find what they are looking for on your website. 

2. Attribute Data

Attribute data refers to the specific, detailed information or characteristics assigned to a product or entity. These attributes describe various aspects such as size, colour, material, weight, technical specifications, and any other critical feature. Attributes allow you to filter, compare similar products, and search a product catalogue. A PIM system allows the proper management of attributes to ensure that data is governed and consistent across all your channels. Without this information, customers could end up buying a product that isn’t quite right for them. 

3. Product Taxonomies 

Product taxonomies are hierarchical classification systems that organise products into categories, subcategories, and additional levels based on shared characteristics or functions. They provide a structured framework for grouping products logically, making it easier for customers to navigate and find products in catalogs, e-commerce sites, or product catalogs. Taxonomies help standardise product classification across different systems and channels, facilitating efficient data management and integration.

4. Digital Assets 

Shoppers presented with high-quality images and videos are more likely to purchase on your website. Many brands estimate that investing in better digital assets can increase conversion rates by anywhere between 30 and 90%, depending on the product and industry.  Digital Assets include photos, images, technical drawings, videos, user-generated content and any other forms of digital media which are relevant. A digital asset management system is where these assets are usually stored.  To maximise their impact, each asset must be accurately linked to its corresponding product data, which is where a product information management (PIM) system proves valuable.

5. Pricing & Discounts

Product information should include pricing. Pricing can vary for several reasons. Prices may vary across different geographies and locales, and they can also fluctuate based on the type of customer. For companies that have both a B2B and a B2C arm, especially for the B2B arm, there could be many price differences and discounts associated with them. Therefore, a larger customer may receive better preferential prices compared to a smaller customer. For a company with a small catalogue selling in one country, it may make sense to keep this data in a spreadsheet, but for a larger catalog with more complex pricing or even frequent price updates, think clearance items, holiday sales, it makes sense to manage this within a PIM system to ensure you have the right kind of governance in place. Without this, even a minor pricing update error can have a significant impact on revenue.

Real-life Example

An example of this was a pricing glitch that occurred at Zappos around 2010, where a pricing error created a maximum price of US$50 on all websites. This meant that luxury items worth thousands of dollars were sold for a fraction of the cost. The losses totalled over $1.5 million. Zappos chose to honour the sales, which demonstrates the significant financial and reputational risk from a pricing mistake like this. 

6. Inventory & Availability

Inventory and availability are related concepts, but have their own distinct concepts. Inventory is essentially the total amount of stock a business has on hand, including all goods stored in warehouses or storage facilities, regardless of whether they’re currently available for sale or not. Availability, on the other hand, refers to whether a customer can purchase a particular product at a given moment. It takes into account current stock levels, demand, and supply chain conditions, providing a real-time picture of whether an item is in stock, can be back-ordered, or is out of stock.

Real-life Example

We helped Modere implement Pimcore to manage its inventory. Which means all the products they have across their 26 warehouses are tracked in one place. This system pulls updated stock numbers from their ERP and integrates sales data. Hence, it always knows how much product is actually available for customers to buy, not just what’s physically in the warehouse but what’s free to be sold after accounting for orders already placed via their subscription orders. This ensures that online shoppers see accurate inventory levels, helping Modere avoid selling items that aren’t actually available while efficiently managing inventory across different locations and ecommerce platforms.

What is Enterprise Product Catalog Management?

Enterprise product catalog management is designed for organisations that have extensive product catalogs and operate potentially multiple brands, divisions, and across several countries. They often have a lot of complexity within their business, this could be from the way their product hierarchies are, the different languages that they manage, and the multiple currencies that they sell their products in, or the range of channels that they sell on, where essentially there's a really high data governance requirement and potential compliance needs across different locales and countries.

Key Features of Enterprise PCM Systems

To recap, the features of an enterprise product catalog management system include: 1. Advanced search and filtering of your product catalog

2. Ability to create an electronic catalog, i.e website

3. Allowing you to update, edit and rearrange product data

4. Ability to organise products based on categories, classifications or other hierarchical rules such as product families, variants and bundles

6. Allowing you to store pricing and inventory availability across different regions

7. Ensuring data quality and consistency via validation rules

8. Ability to set role-based access and permission levels to ensure data governance

What Are The Different Types of Product Catalog Management Software?

Product Information Management (PIM) Systems

PIM platforms serve as the central source of truth for product master data, managing complex relationships between product types, which include inheritance or hierarchy-based relationships, variant relationships, and cross-references such as complementary or recommended products. 

Enterprise PIM solutions include:

Tier 1 Enterprise: Informatica MDM, Stibo STEP

• Capabilities: 50M+ SKU capacity, hundreds of concurrent users and pre-built workflows
• Investment: £800K-£10M implementation, £250K+ annual licensing
• Use case: Global manufacturers with complex bills of materials, master data and regulatory requirements

Mid-Market Leaders: Akeneo, inRiver, Salsify, Pimcore

• Capabilities: 1M+ SKU capacity, 100+ users, marketplace connectors
• Investment: $150K-$1M implementation, £25K-£150K annual licensing fees
• Use case: Retailers and brands with 10,000-1,000,000 SKUs

PIM solutions can be broken down into 4 types: 

• Open Source software: Pimcore
• On-premise software: Pimcore
• Saas based software: Akeneo and Inriver
• PAAS based sofware

PIM Deployment Models

Organisations can choose from four primary deployment approaches based on their technical capabilities, budget, and control requirements:

Open Source Software

Open source PIM solutions like Pimcore POCL and Akeneo Community Edition provide organisations with full source code access, unlimited customisation potential, and potential savings from licensing fees. These platforms typically require an investment of £50,000 to £300,000 in implementation and development costs, plus ongoing hosting and maintenance expenses. They're ideal for organisations with strong in-house development teams who want maximum flexibility and control without vendor lock-in. Pimcore, for example, powers product catalogues for major brands like Audi, whilst Akeneo Community Edition is popular among mid-sized retailers building highly customised workflows that wouldn't be possible with proprietary systems. However, it is worth noting that Pimcore has recently revised its licensing policy, now offering only the open-source version to merchants with a turnover of less than $5 million. 

On-premise Software

PIM deployments, such as Pimcore, Stibo STEP, and SAP MDM, provide enterprises with complete data sovereignty and infrastructure control, as systems are hosted within their own data centres. Implementation costs typically range from £200,000 to £2M+, with annual licensing and maintenance fees of £ 50 K to £ 300 K, making this the most capital-intensive option. This approach suits enterprises with strict data residency requirements, significant existing data centre infrastructure, or regulatory compliance requirements that prohibit cloud storage. Manufacturing firms managing sensitive product formulations and healthcare organisations with stringent data governance requirements often choose on-premise deployments to maintain absolute control over their product information and integration with legacy ERP systems.

SaaS-Based Software:

SaaS PIM platforms, such as Akeneo PIM, inRiver, Salsify, and Plytix, can offer rapid deployment (weeks rather than months), automatic updates, predictable subscription pricing, and built-in scalability without the need for infrastructure management overhead. Implementation costs can still range from £ 30,000 to £ 500,000, with annual subscriptions of around £ 15,000 to £ 200,000, making this the most cost-effective entry point for many organisations. These cloud-based solutions are ideal for fast-growing brands prioritising speed to market, distributed teams requiring anywhere access, and businesses wanting to minimise IT infrastructure responsibilities. InRiver serves fashion retailers like Helly Hansen, while Salsify powers direct-to-consumer brands and marketplace sellers. Plytix specifically targets SMBs managing up to 50,000 SKUs who need professional PIM capabilities without the complexity of an enterprise solution.

Cloud-Based Software

Cloud-based software deployment of PIM systems involves hosting solutions like Pimcore on cloud infrastructure providers such as AWS, Azure, or Google Cloud Platform, utilising containerization technologies like Kubernetes and Docker. This approach requires investment of £50K-£500K for implementation and £20K-£100K in annual platform and infrastructure fees, positioning it between traditional on-premise and fully managed SaaS options. Hamari has built an Azure-based accelerator, a scalable, turn-key solution that allows brands to focus on configuration rather than setup. This deployment model suits organisations that want cloud benefits and infrastructure flexibility while maintaining greater control over their environment than fully managed SaaS solutions provide.

PaaS-Based Software

PaaS (Platform-as-a-Service) deployments appeal to digital-native brands building headless, API-driven commerce architectures and enterprises undergoing digital transformation who want cloud scalability and flexibility, whilst maintaining more control over their infrastructure than pure SaaS allows. Pimcore has partnered with Upsun (formerly Platform.sh), a leading PaaS provider, to offer streamlined deployment and management capabilities with automated provisioning, continuous deployment pipelines, and managed infrastructure services. Organisations choose this model when they need the composability and developer-centric tooling of cloud-native architecture but have the technical expertise to manage containerised deployments and want to avoid the constraints of vendor-managed SaaS environments.

Master Data Management (MDM) Platforms

MDM platforms extend beyond product information to encompass customers, suppliers, locations, and complex hierarchical relationships across the enterprise. Solutions like Informatica MDM create "golden records" through matching, merging, and relating records across critical business applications whilst preserving data lineage. 

To illustrate the use of MDM capabilities, Informatica cleaned and reconciled more than eight primary data sources, including 150,000 Salesforce accounts and 50,000 Oracle accounts, to create its master list of 500,000 customer accounts. It also consolidated 9 million individual contact records into a clean list of 3.7 million records, resulting in a consolidated single view of the customer. Stibo STEP serves customers including Europart (automotive replacement parts), Grupo Chedraui (a Mexican retailer), Nortera (a producer of frozen and canned vegetables), and Signet Jewellers (North America's largest diamond jewellery retailer). These platforms integrate with core enterprise systems, including ERP, CRM, PLM, and e-commerce applications, to maintain data consistency across the organisation. It is worth mentioning that Pimcore offers several of these master data management capabilities at a significantly lower licensing fee. 

Digital Asset Management (DAM) Systems

DAM platforms help to manage product images, videos, and documents typical in enterprise catalogs, and this is where I've seen projects struggle. Implementing a DAM can seem like a large investment into yet another system until you realise that you're actually dealing with enterprise-scale catalogs where you can have millions of digital assets being managed by multiple teams across different countries and locations.

Pimcore's DAM handles the heavy lifting of asset management with several key features, including automated format conversion, AI-based upscaling, watermarking, and single-source publishing. It enables you to maintain a single high-resolution master image, and it automatically generates all your channel-specific formats. If, for example, you have one product which is being sold across different european countries with different print catalog designs, your DAM will automatically format for each specific requirement. It also features several innovative built-in functions. For example, for a fashion brand, it includes focal point detection and automatic face recognition, so when you upload a product shot, Pimcore identifies the important bits and ensures they're properly framed whether you're outputting square images for Amazon, landscape heroes for your website’s hero banner, or vertical formats for your Instagram page. The Pimcore Copilot further extends the DAM, adding proper AI-first capabilities through OpenAI and HuggingFace integration. Imagine being able to perform background removal, object manipulation, and generative fills, all with the simplicity of simple prompts rather than manual editing. Sounds brilliant, right and honestly, it is once you start experimenting; the possibilities with what you can do are endless.

However, it is worth mentioning what the venor demos gloss over. It’s not just buying a new shiny tech; you still need to consider the setup investment. Just like implementing any other system, you need to define up front what your DAM needs to do. You need to define every digital output format, transformation rule, and focal point logic upfront. I spent three weeks configuring this for a height safety manufacturer, mapping requirements across both their web and print catalogs with different aspect ratios, image sizes, image thumbnailing, for SEO-optimised compressed images and quality settings. What’s great about Pimcore in comparison with other mid-market solutions is that the native PIM integration means assets inherit metadata from product records automatically. The DAM-processed images are associated correctly with the product data, which saves time but requires thoughtful planning. Get your asset-to-product relationships wrong early on, and it will take your data stewards a long time to figure out the mistakes (talking from experience - lol). Once correctly configured, though, it genuinely transformed the client's workflow, eliminating days of manual Photoshop work per product launch and ensuring consistency across every channel without someone manually exporting 27 variants per image for all their different catalogs.

There are several standalone DAM solutions, as well as integrated PIM & DAM solutions. Pimcore and Akeneo offer an integrated solution. But there are also best-of-breed DAM solutions such as Bynder and Cloudinary, which can easily integrate with product catalog management systems via API’s. 

Multi-Channel Publishing and Feed Management

Multi-channel publishing is where catalog management can significantly impact your revenue growth. Feed management platforms like Feedonomics can handle marketplace syndication across 2,000+ formats, including Amazon, eBay, Google Shopping, Facebook, Instagram, TikTok Shop, with automated category mapping and performance monitoring that tracks acceptance rates per channel. The critical technology that a feed management platform will provide is real-time synchronisation, which is required when inventory levels or pricing changes; that information needs to flow to every channel simultaneously. Without a centralised product data catalogue, you're manually updating multiple platforms, creating inevitable discrepancies, and when a mistake occurs, you start receiving more customer complaints. 

We recently worked with a home goods retailer who discovered 5% of their Google Shopping feed was missing critical attributes, costing them three months of visibility on high-margin products before anyone noticed. The real opportunity isn't just maintaining existing channels; it's spotting emerging ones early. TikTok Shop seemed like a fad a couple of years ago; now it's driving serious revenue for brands that got their feeds sorted quickly. The brands winning at multi-channel aren't necessarily the biggest, but the ones with proper catalog infrastructure that lets them test new channels with accuracy in days, not months.

As product information management (PIM) systems evolve into product experience management systems, Gartner proposes that the product catalog should power the product feed platforms and not the e-commerce systems, which is the current way of doing things for most retailers as this causes data integrity issues downstream across the syndicated channels. There are several stand-alone feed platforms, such as Channable and Feedonomics, that can be integrated with a PIM solution. However, companies such as Akeneo, Inriver, and Salsify offer one-click Syndication out of the box. Pimcore competes in this offering by having a native integration with ProductsUp. 

Print Automation Tools

Print automation is one of those areas where product catalog management really proves its worth, yet I'm still surprised by how many brands underestimate it and prefer to populate their brochures via Adobe InDesign manually. When you're managing catalogs, product sheets, or marketing materials across multiple channels, manual processes don't scale. I've seen teams drown in InDesign files as they try to keep everything updated. Worst of all, it can have a direct negative impact on sales. One of our manufacturing clients was regularly printing their catalogs later than expected. This would mean that the sales team would have to adhere to old prices, which may have been impacted by inflation. This would regularly affect the company's expected revenue figures, which would impact the organisation's bottom line. Once they implemented a product catalog management system and used Pimcore’s Web-2-Print feature to power their catalogs they were finally able to print their updated catalogs on time. Proper print automation through the PIM saved them weeks of work. 

Pimcore handles this particularly well with its integrated content management system, allowing you to define templates using Twig that pull product data directly and regenerate materials whenever attributes change. Akeneo's approach is similar, but it requires more third-party connectors, which can be cumbersome depending on your workflow. Contentserv offers solid automation features, especially for brand-specific print requirements, but you're paying premium prices for that convenience. The key thing, and where I see clients struggle, is treating print automation as an afterthought rather than planning it into your PIM implementation from day one. You need to think about your template structures, data completeness requirements, and approval workflows upfront. Different teams across various geographies should agree on the templates and visual formats upfront, thereby preventing costly redevelopment post-launch. Or worse of all, ending up with a powerful tool that nobody actually uses because it wasn't configured properly for real-world catalog production scenarios.

Pimocre now also has native connectors with Adobe InDesign and other print management solutions, similar to other competing solutions such as Akeneo and Inriver. However, at Hamari we have experience developing fully custom Web2Print solutions via open source such as Gotenburg.

What Are the Biggest Challenges Affecting Product Catalog Management?

Product catalog management is messier than most vendors like to admit (especially in the sales process). I've worked with dozens of brands, and the challenges are remarkably consistent, regardless of whether you're on Pimcore, InRiver or Stibo. The difference is how you handle them.

1. Data quality degradation is the first issue that becomes apparent as your product data deteriorates over time. Suppliers change specifications, packaging gets updated, ingredients are reformulated, and suddenly your catalog is outdated. This is known to occur at approximately 2% per month if you're not actively maintaining it. The most frustrating part? It's the small inconsistencies that can cause the biggest headaches. You'll have "500ml" in one place, "0.5L" in another, and "16.9 fl oz" appearing elsewhere, all referring to the same product. I’ve seen this with merchants uploading to Google Merchant Centre with a (PCM), and it's responsible for about a third of marketplace rejections I come across. The reality is that most brands are running at 67% completion for required fields, which is frankly not good enough if you're serious about multichannel sales.
2. Marketplace Rejection becomes a recurring issue. If you're not receiving rejections, it’s likely because you're not selling on enough channels yet. Google rejects around 34% of first submissions, usually due to GTIN mismatches or image quality issues. Amazon's average is better at 21%, but their title length restrictions and bullet point formatting requirements often catch people out. Walmart sits at 28%, and on Zalando at 41% for fashion brands. The trick isn't avoiding rejections entirely; that's unrealistic. It's building validation workflows that catch errors before submission. Pre-flight checks using platform-specific rule engines can save enormous amounts of time; however, you need to configure them properly, which most teams often skip due to the rush to launch.
3. Cross-functional Communication Issues is perhaps the most underestimated challenge. It’s often also the issue that the vendor fails to warn you on. Product data doesn't live in one department, it touches marketing, engineering, product, compliance, regional teams, and IT at minimum for a manufacturer. For one of our clients, I've counted 14 departments involved in some organizations, which can really complicate things. Marketing writes the product copy but may not have visibility into technical specifications (causing all sorts SEO issues). Your buying team has already collected material compositions, compliance certifications, and technical specs from suppliers, but if that data sits in procurement systems rather than feeding into your PIM, merchandising ends up requesting the same information again or launching products with incomplete attributes. Then you've got regional teams creating their own versions of product data to handle local compliance requirements; GDPR, different labeling standards, translated content, rather than managing them as proper variants within your product catalog system. Without a proper RACI matrix that people actually follow, you end up with data silos across departments, inconsistent information damaging customer trust, and teams bypassing the PIM entirely because cross-departmental workflows weren't mapped during implementation. 

Without delving into them in too much detail other problems include:

Creating complex bundles with dependencies such as BOM, nested bundles and bundled variants

1. Supplier data inconsistencies and differences in their schema, terminology and mapping them to a standardised data model
2. Organising a wide variety of products in a hierarchy with the relevant associations and complexities such as fitment type, complementary products and associated products
3. Dealing with suppliers and other brands ensuring accurate inventory availability