Too many retailers rely on outdated tools to manage their content, which stifles growth and turns off customers, says Roxanne Lewington, growth marketing manager at Canto.
First, a question. How does your business manage its digital content? By this I mean everything from images and videos to marketing brochures to product information. Are they centralised in a cloud storage or digital asset management (DAM) solution, or are they kept… well… all over the place? If you answered the latter (perhaps while shifting uncomfortably in your seat) you’re not alone.
Content chaos
Nearly half of organisations still use local servers (44%) and individual hard drives and desktops (41%) to manage and organise their digital content, according to Canto’s State of Digital Content 2026 report which launched last month. When it comes to product information, more than half (51%) still use spreadsheets to track details like sizing, pricing, and so on.
That’s an awful lot of content sitting on someone’s device hidden from the rest of the team, and it can create worrying risks around version control and outdated or off-brand content.
Usually, these businesses use a mix of different processes, with some assets stored locally, some in the cloud, some on individual devices. But this patchwork approach is a problem itself, adding complexity to something which should be simplified. Before you know it, even something straightforward like finding an image becomes a nightmare task.
The growth trap
It’s understandable how this happens, especially among smaller retailers.
Your company may have grown organically, from a one-person kitchen-table start-up to a fully-fledged retailer employing several staff and with 100s – or perhaps 1,000s – of SKUs.
Many retailers we work with at Canto find their software simply hasn’t kept pace with their business growth. Suddenly, they realise they have files scattered across drives and folders, their product details are siloed in spreadsheets, and their teams are doing endless workarounds and stuck in file‑name hell.
Adding more tooling often isn’t the answer, as without proper integration this actually creates more clunky workarounds. The answer for small retailers is consolidating and centralising all those digital assets and product details – and creating one single source of the truth.
Successful scaling
The proposition is simple: businesses which have outgrown manual processes find huge gains from introducing a digital asset management (DAM) platform. This off-the-shelf software is like an intelligent AI-powered library, enabling marketing, product, sales and other functions across the business to store, organise and manage digital assets. It also enables instant distribution from the platform straight to ecommerce sites, social media and other channels.
If this sounds too good to be true, then consider the stats. Brands which use a DAM solution are far more likely to have the strongest returns on their content and creative output, compared to those without a DAM (66% vs 40%). And even when it comes to practical day-to-day workflow, teams with a fully integrated DAM platform are more than three times more likely to find it easy locating assets (67% vs 21%).
While traditional DAM platforms are built for image and video content rather than product info, some more innovative solutions such as Canto’s DAM for Products are tailor-made for product retailers: businesses can see their assets product-by-product, with images, video and marketing files side-by-side with important product descriptions, price, dimensions, and other info.
It’s worth mentioning that onboarding a software solution like this doesn’t have to mean a big internal upheaval. The platform should be intuitive, accessible, and even enjoyable to use. In fact, making it easy is critical to ensuring your teams actually use it, and ensuring even the less tech savvy can navigate through and understand your content.
So, if your business is ready to go from content chaos to successful scaling – perhaps it’s time to ditch the spreadsheets and test-drive a solution built for growing retailers.
Canto’s DAM for Products 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.
