How to Optimise Your Digital Catalogues

Retail partners rely on accurate, timely product data to maintain sales and avoid supply chain issues. Real-time updates to digital catalogues are essential in ensuring optimised stock levels and smooth sales operations. Additionally, each of these trading partners may require slightly different data formats or fields—from pricing and product descriptions to stock levels and SKUs. Even a single incorrect detail can cause errors, delays, and ultimately, missed revenue. This is where catalogue automation comes in. This digital transformation solution ensures that manufacturers and suppliers provide their entire retailer network with up-to-date product information in a format that integrates into their sales and stock systems.

This blog outlines the key challenges for businesses managing digital catalogues and how a catalogue automation tool can overcome them to strengthen supplier-retailer relationships.

Manufacturers and suppliers face several hurdles when distributing product and pricing catalogues across their supply-chain network. These can be predominantly categorised into two camps:

It’s no surprise that ensuring consistent, up-to-date data across all platforms is essential for retailers to have reliable product data across all customer touchpoints. Managing the distribution of this vital product information manually only provides opportunities for errors to creep in. Data inaccuracies, such as outdated pricing or incorrect product details, not only cause confusion but can also lead to lost sales, customer dissatisfaction, and even damage supplier-retailer relationships.

As touched on above, the manual processing of catalogue updates is inefficient. Even aside from the risk of errors, this approach is also time-consuming, labour-intensive, and costly:

Businesses can tackle these pain points head-on with catalogue automation. This results in lower operational costs, more responsive trading relationships, and greater supply chain resilience.

Overcoming the challenges outlined above is simple – deploying a digital transformation solution that provides automated catalogue distribution across the retail network.

This is achieved with a dedicated catalogue automation layer that sits between the manufacturer/supplier systems and the retailer endpoints. Electronic Data Interchange (EDI) and Application Programming Interface (API) technologies are harnessed to integrate individual product catalogues with the appropriate retailer. This means that any data that is added or changed on the manufacturer/supplier-side is automatically fed through this automation layer and distributed to the correct retail endpoint in the correct format simultaneously. Thus eliminating the need for time-consuming and error-prone manual updates to multiple individual catalogues. For example, instead of relying on spreadsheets and emails, manufacturers can enable direct system-to-system communication with product updates on a daily, hourly, or even a real-time basis.

Here is a visual representation of how this solution works:

Transalis has worked with several businesses facing complex catalogue distribution challenges—particularly those trading with a mix of large retailers, resellers, and smaller partners.

One client, a global tech distributor, needed to share detailed product catalogues with a network that included major retail chains, enterprise resellers, and over 1,800 independent sellers. Each partner required different formats and levels of product data. Setting up individual EDI connections for each recipient wasn’t commercially viable due to the cost and time involved.

Transalis addressed this with a solution that connected the client’s internal systems to all external endpoints. The digital transformation layer automatically extracted product data, converted it into the correct format—such as PDFs, emails, or direct system integrations—and sent it to each trading partner based on their requirements. This approach allowed the distributor to send tailored catalogues to each partner, accounting for differences in product selection and pricing. It reduced manual work, lowered costs, and improved data accuracy.

Transalis has implemented similar solutions across a range of industries, helping businesses manage large volumes of product data across multiple retail channels with greater reliability and less administrative overhead.