New research finds inefficient software is holding online retailers back – but identifying the right solutions is easier than they might think, explains Roxanne Lewington, Growth Marketing Manager at Canto.
An ever-increasing array of channels, a revolving carousel of product changes, and sky-high customer expectations. It’s no exaggeration to say online retailing is like walking a tightrope – and when it comes to managing your product content like imagery and video, putting a foot wrong can lead to a big drop.
The facts on this are worrying. Nearly all teams working with product content say accuracy and consistency are critical for trust and sales, but 88% of them struggle to keep product information consistent across channels, according to Canto’s State of Digital Content 2026 report.
At the same time, 78% of teams use two or more separate solutions to manage their product content. If those solutions don’t communicate with each other efficiently, this can result in clunky processes and workarounds.
There are three main ways retailers are managing these challenges – and the bad news is none of them are perfect.
Common approaches – and why they don’t quite work
Let’s start with the basics: many retailers still manage their inventory on spreadsheets. This is completely understandable but, when it comes to managing product information, Excel is not so excel-lent. A spreadsheet is high effort and high risk. Every time there’s a minor change to a product (say, a new season, or a SKU change) then this must be manually updated. Very soon your organisation is working from different file versions, human error is creeping in, and embarrassing slip-ups and customer complaints are just round the corner.
Another option popular among bigger enterprise-level retailers is a Product Information Management (PIM) solution. Platforms like Akeneo offer management of product details, SKUs, stock levels – all the vital data you need to organise your products. But PIM platforms are more for the technical side of business: when it comes to creative, content and marketing, retailers are left with little to go on. The software isn’t designed for organising images, video, brochures and other digital assets – let alone publishing these directly to socials or e-commerce. Plus for many small and mid-sized retailers, a PIM solution might be overkill.
Then there are digital asset management (DAM) solutions which, as you can guess from the name, enable marketers to organise the entire lifecycle of their content. While DAM platforms are of course by far the best solution for centralising and managing content – in fact, businesses with the strongest returns on their content and creative are significantly more likely to use a DAM (66%) than those which don’t (40%) – the fact is, not every DAM solution is as perfect for a product-led retailer as it should be.
In a traditional DAM platform, you search by asset – meaning if you want to find all of the product images and videos for, say, your latest mascara product, you’d have to track them down individually. To put it simply: compared to other organisations, product retailers need more than a traditional DAM.
Where DAM and products meet
For certain types of online retailers – those with an inventory of a few 100s or 1,000s of SKUs – there’s a sweet spot here. A solution more reliable than a spreadsheet, less full-on than a PIM, and more fine-tuned than a traditional DAM.
What an online retailer needs from their DAM tool is to be served with all their assets by product, so they can see in one view all those key product details like sizing, pricing, regions, etc, as well as all the content, images, files, and so on, which relate to it. This significantly streamlines the content management process, automating those manual tasks and freeing up resources for more valuable work.
Now, add to this the ability to publish images and video from your internal platform directly to your channels, e-commerce, and retail sites. Canto’s DAM for Products even enables retailers to automatically meet the specs and requirements for online shops hosted by the likes of Shopify. For those 9 in 10 retailers currently failing to maintain consistency across channels, suddenly this task isn’t such a struggle.
So, this is the difference between a traditional DAM solution and a product-first DAM. And I’d say for a retailer in that 100s-1000s SKU range, a product-focused DAM will provide probably 80% of what they need.
This isn’t just opinion. Research has found that retailers with full connectivity between their digital assets and product info are over 4x more likely to have seen significant improvements in their content ROI in the last year, compared to those with little or no integration (56% vs 13%).
So, as retailers try traversing that sales and marketing tightrope, at least now their product content can be one less worry.
Canto is the industry’s leading AI-powered digital asset management (DAM) platform — uniting product information and brand assets for complete, accurate product stories across every channel.
