Product data quality may not be a glamorous topic, but it’s an essential one nonetheless. Many B2B organizations still rely on tedious manual processes to manage their data, while others have embraced AI to find a competitive edge. Companies that fall behind in data management not only lose an average of $12.9 million annually, according to Forbes, but also miss out on potential revenue opportunities.
With AI-powered product ingestion solutions, you can streamline your data, ensuring clean, structured information flows across your organization.
What’s Slowing Down Product Speed to Market?
For distributors, the challenge of getting SKUs to market quickly can be a roadblock to growth. Imagine this: Every year, you’re tasked with onboarding tens of thousands of new SKUs from suppliers. Each SKU isn’t just a name and a price tag; it’s a mountain of data. On average, each SKU has over 700 attributes, including descriptions, imagery, pricing, logistical details, fulfillment requirements and more. And they don’t come neatly packaged, either: They arrive in 500 different formats, leaving your team scrambling to make sense of it all.
The time it takes to address these challenges adds up quickly. A single SKU can take four weeks to be market-ready, according to research from McKinsey. Multiply that across your annual pipeline, and the inefficiencies balloon. Manual back-and-forth communication with suppliers, endless validation processes and mounting errors in product data result in upwards of 15,000 issues a year. Fixing those issues eats up your team’s time and limits your company’s growth potential. And despite all the effort, your catalog still ends up looking like a puzzle with half its pieces missing.
The Cost of Staying Manual
The manual process isn’t just inefficient– it’s downright draining. Every hour spent verifying SKU data is an hour lost. It delays time to market and increases labor costs, and you still won’t end up with high-quality product data. You can throw more people at the problem, but that’s like trying to patch a leaky boat with duct tape: It might work for a while, but it’s hardly a long-term fix. The reality is that this approach doesn’t scale, and in today’s fast-paced market, falling behind isn’t an option.
But let’s talk about what’s even more damaging: lost revenue.
When buyers can’t find accurate product information, or worse, can’t find the product itself, they move on—often to a competitor. When you don’t have the ability to quickly react to market trends with updated SKUs and real-time pricing, you lose potential sales to competitors that do. Over time, these missed opportunities add up to millions in unrealized revenue—not because demand wasn’t there, but because the data wasn’t good enough.
The Overlooked Gap
Many Fortune 500 distributors have invested in tools like PIMs (Product Information Management systems), MDM (Master Data Management) or content syndication platforms, hoping they’ll be the silver bullet. These tools are great at what they do, i.e., managing and organizing product information once it’s clean and structured. But they don’t address the messy, chaotic part of the process: gathering data from a variety of suppliers. The real bottleneck lies in preparing, cleaning and standardizing data before it ever gets to the MDM or PIM.
The Way Forward: AI-powered Product Ingestion Solutions
B2B distributors from all industries can transform their product data management processes by implementing an AI-powered product ingestion and supplier portal solution that acts as a single entry point for product data. With this approach, the organization sets its own business rules to automatically standardize supplier submissions. These rules typically include:
- Product hierarchy & classification to structure SKUs effectively
- Defined attributes with mandatory, recommended and optional fields
- Quality and compliance criteria, such as character limits for product titles and descriptions, structured lists and data formatting requirements
Once in place, this system streamlines the process for both suppliers and the distributor’s data team while automating data validation. It typically functions as follows:
- Onboard & Ingest – Suppliers and data syndication platforms submit data in any format, using multiple channels (API, cXML, file uploads, etc.).
- Classify & Map – AI automatically categorizes and aligns data with your taxonomy, eliminating the need for manual adjustments.
- Control – The portal instantly detects missing or non-compliant data, notifying data teams and suppliers of necessary corrections.
- Enrich – GenAI enhances product descriptions, suggests missing attributes and automates tasks like translation.
Once collected and refined, this clean, structured data can seamlessly flow into all business-critical systems (PIM, MDM, ERP) and sales channels. By eliminating inefficiencies and ensuring high-quality data from the start, supplier portals powered by GenAI turn a longstanding challenge into a strategic advantage.
This isn’t just a theory. At my company, we’ve seen distributors use such tools to achieve measurable results. On average, catalog onboarding time dropped from 15 days in 2020 to just 24 hours in 2024, a 91% reduction. We also saw AI-powered automation reduce data errors significantly and cut the time spent fixing issues and editing content by 30%, on average. Yet most distributors still struggle with inefficient processes and frequent mistakes.
Eliminating manual bottlenecks helps businesses move faster, improve accuracy and unlock new growth opportunities. The right solution should seamlessly handle ingestion, classification, enrichment and governance, turning product data from a challenge into a growth enabler.
Don’t Let the Bottleneck Define You
In today’s market, speed isn’t just an advantage — it’s a necessity. Organizations that continue relying on manual processes risk falling behind, while those that embrace automation can focus on growth instead of firefighting. Product data may not be glamorous but getting it right changes everything.
Your competitors aren’t waiting, so why should you?
Marc Teulières, with over 15 years in B2B commerce, leads Mirakl's global B2B business, partnering with wholesale distributors, manufacturers, and procurement organizations in their digital transformation journey. Mirakl is the leading platform provider for digital commerce acceleration, offering comprehensive solutions including supplier onboarding & product data management, dropship & marketplace platforms, and retail media networks that power the world's most innovative retailers and B2B organizations.