What manual product management usually looks like
A price list arrives by email. It is opened in Excel, compared with the previous version, and the changes are transferred to the webshop and the business system, one at a time. New products are created by hand: names rewritten, images downloaded and uploaded again, category and attributes filled in. Stock levels are checked with the supplier when someone has time.
With a small assortment, it works. The work is manageable and whoever does it knows where everything is.
Where it starts to go wrong
As the assortment and the number of suppliers grow, the work grows at the same rate. Updates fall behind, so prices and stock levels lag. New products at the supplier are discovered late. Every copy is a chance to get something wrong, and mistakes show up directly for customers, as a wrong price or a product that cannot be delivered.
What changes with automation
With Ecombooster the recurring steps happen automatically, while the decisions stay with you:
- Product data, prices and stock are fetched from suppliers on a schedule. See automatic data collection.
- Product names, categories and attributes are set by rules that run on every new product. See the rule engine.
- Selling prices are calculated from purchase prices with your pricing rules. See price automation.
- Changes are synced to the store, and you see what differs before anything is sent. See integrations.
When is manual management enough?
If you have a few hundred products from a handful of suppliers that rarely change, automation is seldom worth the switch. The larger the assortment and the more suppliers you have, the more time goes into manual work and the bigger the gain from automating. Work out your own case with the ROI calculator.
Frequently asked questions
How much time will we save?
It depends on the size of the assortment, the number of suppliers and how often they change. The ROI calculator lets you work out your own situation.
Do we lose control when things happen automatically?
No. Rules can be previewed against real products before they go live, syncs can be dry-run without changing anything, and every field change is logged with its source and cause.
Can we start small?
Yes. The free tier covers one supplier, one integration and up to 500 products for six months, so you can try it with part of the assortment. See pricing.
Can we keep working in Excel?
An existing catalog can be bulk-imported from Excel to get started. After that, product data is managed in Ecombooster, so there is one version to work from.