Product management for ecommerce — From supplier to webshop — automatically

What is product management in ecommerce?

Product management is the ongoing work of keeping your assortment right: adding new products, updating prices and stock, phasing out what can no longer be bought, and making sure everything actually shows in the store. Where a PIM system is where product information lives, product management is the flow that keeps it current.

For a retailer with suppliers, it is work that never ends. Every supplier changes prices, launches new items and drops others, and every change has to reach the store.

Why it gets heavy as the assortment grows

With a few hundred products and one supplier, a spreadsheet can keep things in order. With thousands of items from several suppliers, every update multiplies. A price list becomes hundreds of rows to transfer by hand, a discontinued item stays on sale, and new supplier products are only discovered when a customer asks for them.

It is not just time-consuming. Every manual transfer is a chance to get something wrong, and the mistakes land right in front of customers.

How Ecombooster automates product management

Ecombooster takes care of the recurring steps, so the work becomes making decisions rather than moving data:

• New products. New supplier items appear automatically as their data is collected. You choose which ones go into the catalog and copy in one or several at a time, with category, classification and variants set in the same step. Read more about supplier integration.
• Prices. The selling price is calculated automatically with your pricing rules, such as markup, target margin or recommended retail price (RRP), and follows along when purchase prices or exchange rates change. See price automation.
• Stock and availability. Stock levels and lead times are updated from suppliers, and products can be activated and deactivated according to supplier availability and lifecycle. If a product is linked to several suppliers, the next in line takes over when the first runs out. Read more about inventory management.
• Bulk editing. Filter out exactly the products that need attention, for example everything missing a category, images or a description, and change them in one go in dedicated views for pricing, categorisation and SKUs.
• Rules instead of manual work. Product names, attributes and categories are driven by the rule engine and run on every update, so new products are right from the start.
• Publishing. Changes reach the store through platform comparison, where you see what differs and choose what is master. You also choose which fields, such as stock and prices, are updated in the store automatically the moment they change. More about sync.

Who is it for?

Automated product management pays off most for retailers with a large assortment from external suppliers, typically from around a thousand items, and for those who want to add suppliers without the work of creating and updating products growing at the same rate.

If you sell a small assortment that rarely changes, or create all product data yourself, the need for automation is smaller.

Example: a supplier changes its mind

A supplier raises its purchase prices and at the same time stops stocking one of its items. At the next import, Ecombooster reads the new prices, recalculates selling prices with your pricing rules and marks the item as out of stock at that supplier.

If the item is available from another supplier you have linked to the product, that supplier becomes the source for price and availability. If it is not available anywhere else, the product can be deactivated according to your settings. Every change is logged with its source, so you can always see afterwards why a price ended up where it did.

Frequently asked questions