Consumer brands: one product record, every channel

The same product is described four different ways depending on where you buy it

The problem

Product content grows one channel at a time. The brand site gets built, then a retailer needs its own template, then a marketplace needs different image ratios and a different character limit, then a second marketplace arrives with its own requirements. Each one ends up holding its own copy of the same product, maintained by whoever owns that channel.

The usual answer

From then on they drift. A specification is corrected on the brand site and not on the marketplace. An ingredient change goes to the retailer that asked and not to the two that did not. Old packaging photography stays live on the channel nobody checks. The version a customer sees depends on where they happened to look, and when something needs fixing across the board it becomes a manual sweep with no way to confirm it reached everywhere. For a regulated claim or a recall notice, that is not just untidy.

How we approach it

We hold the product record once, with the descriptions, images, specifications and claims attached to it, and publish out to each channel in the shape that channel requires. Character limits, image sizes and category fields are handled at the point of publishing rather than by maintaining separate copies. Each channel reports back whether it accepted the update, so a failed push is visible instead of assumed.

What changes

One edit reaches every channel. A change made in the morning is live everywhere by the afternoon, and there is a single answer to what this product currently says. Launching into a new retailer or marketplace becomes a mapping exercise rather than another copy of the catalogue to keep in step.