What you’ll learn:
How product catalogs are evolving in the agentic AI era
For retail enterprises, effective product catalog management has become a cornerstone of business success. A well-organized catalog ensures that product information — such as descriptions, images, categories and attributes — is accurate, consistent and easily navigable. More than just enhancing customer trust, this foundational clarity is essential to driving conversions and fostering brand loyalty.
The quality and relevance of product information directly influence consumer purchasing decisions. A study revealed that 83% of consumers would abandon a site with insufficient product information, and 73% would have a less favorable opinion of a brand with incomplete data. And while 65% of consumers use search engines, online marketplaces and social media for product information, reinforcing the importance of having strong, visual and informative product listings, the use of GenAI’s shopping recommendations continues to rise, so much so that it’s now more trusted than recommendations from friends and family.
Conversely, poor catalog management can lead to significant operational inefficiencies. Inconsistent product data across systems can result in stockouts, overstocking and pricing errors, leading to missed sales opportunities and increased operational costs.
B2C enterprise retailers frequently face challenges such as complex product assortments, multi-regional operations and diverse customer segments. Traditional catalog tools often fall short in managing these complexities, resulting in data silos, manual errors and delayed time-to-market for new products. Without a centralized and scalable catalog management system, businesses risk operational bottlenecks and diminished customer satisfaction.
Finally, agentic AI represents the next frontier in product catalog, with AI systems capable of autonomous decision-making and task execution. Deloitte projects that 25% of enterprises using generative AI will deploy autonomous AI agents by 2025, with this number expected to double to 50% by 2027.
In the context of product catalogs, agentic AI can autonomously manage inventory updates, optimize product categorization and personalize discovery experiences in real-time without human intervention.
AI agents need highly structured, machine-readable data to find, compare and recommend products accurately. A disorganized or incomplete catalog can hinder these agents' ability to accurately recommend products, personalize shopping experiences and optimize inventory management. Therefore, maintaining a high-quality product catalog is not merely a best practice but a necessity for leveraging the full potential of agentic AI.
This will change how consumers — humans and agents — interact with product catalogs, as they can proactively curate and recommend products based on complex behavioral patterns, making the shopping experience not only more intelligent but also autonomous. For instance, 79% of customers say they would find it helpful for AI to understand their specific needs and recommend products accordingly.
The composable advantage for product catalog management
Composable commerce offers a significant advantage for product catalog management by making platforms modular, API-first and highly scalable. With solutions like commercetools, businesses can add new products, channels or customer groups seamlessly, without the need for a complete system overhaul. This flexibility allows retailers to respond quickly to changing market demands, launch new offerings and expand into additional regions without disrupting existing operations.
For merchandisers, a composable architecture means they can manage hundreds of thousands of SKUs across multiple brands, markets and touchpoints from a single platform. This centralization eliminates the inefficiencies of maintaining separate regional systems and reduces the risk of inconsistencies in product data. Teams can update product information once, and it propagates automatically across all channels, ensuring accuracy, speed and operational efficiency at scale.
Perhaps most importantly, composable commerce enables personalization on a large scale. Retailers can tailor product content by region, brand or customer segment without duplicating records, creating hyper-personalized catalog experiences that modern consumers increasingly expect. Personalized catalogs not only enhance engagement but also drive repeat purchases and foster loyalty, turning well-managed product data into a powerful competitive differentiator.
Leveraging product catalog management with commercetools
Even with a best-of-breed technology stack spanning PIM, ERP, and commerce systems, many companies struggle to unify accurate product data to deliver exceptional shopping experiences. commercetools addresses this challenge by providing a flexible, API-first platform that enables businesses to model, customize and manage product data according to their unique needs.
With commercetools, you can seamlessly access and manage all product information through a dynamic, versatile interface that handles even the most complex catalogs. Custom views enable merchandisers to organize product lists and details by segment, region, or brand, while workflows facilitate the verification, editing, approval or rejection of pending product changes, streamlining catalog operations to just a few clicks.
Beyond operational efficiency, commercetools supports recurring revenue models natively within catalog capabilities. Subscription pricing, loyalty incentives and automated recurring orders help retailers predict revenue streams, increase customer lifetime value and maintain consistency across fulfillment and billing.
At the same time, native integrations with AI platforms and flexible catalog structures future-proof your business, enabling rapid adaptation to new discovery channels, agent-driven commerce, and AI-powered recommendations. With Commerce MCP, AI agents gain the full context they need, ensuring seamless, personalized experiences across all touchpoints.
💡 Check our best practice guide for integrating product data
Product data modeling is the process of creating a structured representation of a company’s product information, including attributes, descriptions, specifications and relationships between different products and components. It serves as a blueprint for organizing, storing and managing product data within a centralized system.
This structured approach enables businesses to efficiently manage, update and distribute accurate product information across various channels, enhancing data quality, streamlining processes and ultimately improving the customer experience in eCommerce and other product-related operations.
You have all the flexibility you need to design your product information model and store your product content in commercetools Composable Commerce, which is customizable and adaptable to your needs. With our capabilities, you can:
Define product types and attributes, such as product names, descriptions and images. As you can see in the image above, Product Types contain Attribute Definitions. Attributes are passed on to Products and Product Variants. Finally, Products and all their Product Variants are assigned to Categories.
Group products into any number of categories, establish category hierarchies and create product-to-category relationships to help shoppers easily find what they need.
Create an assortment or selection of products to include or exclude for a certain brand, region, market or country. With Product Tailoring, you can manage market-specific product data for optimized localization efforts.
Organize, centralize and distribute product imagery, audio and video throughout your commerce experience. You can also enrich your image catalog by including granular content for specific product types and attributes.
Manage large amounts of data with import and export capabilities. You can bulk import product data through a CSV upload in the Merchant Center or the Import API, as well as export product data to a CSV file.
Eager to dive deeper?
As commerce turns increasingly agentic in nature, the essential capabilities enabling an intuitive product catalog and discovery powered by commercetools include:
Extensibility: Move beyond out-of-the-box features with API extensibility to support cutting-edge use cases for complex product catalogs and discovery, including product bundles.
Localization: Tailor product catalogs and discovery processes to regional markets with powerful internationalization tools, ensuring relevance and engagement across global audiences.
Omnichannel shopping: Deliver a unified customer experience with one product catalog available across online, in-store and mobile channels.
API-first architecture: Access product, inventory and pricing data in real time through commercetools’ well-defined endpoints.
Decoupled frontends: Connect seamlessly to AI-driven interfaces like ChatGPT, Alexa, or Gemini without depending on a traditional storefront.
Dynamic product feeds and metadata enrichment: Keep product data current and boost visibility in AI-powered recommendation engines.
Managing your product catalog in the Merchant Center
commercetools’ business tooling, the Merchant Center, enables marketers, content managers and business users to manage and run product catalogs and discovery processes without having to rely on technical teams.
For starters, you can create, edit and delete Product Types and Attributes. You can also group Attributes to better organize related Attributes and ease data enhancement workflows.
With Product List, you can manage and search for Products in your Project, as well as view and edit product details, publish and unpublish products in bulk and export products. Plus, you can search through your products using the powerful search and filters in the view. Using advanced product search, you can find products more easily, including functions like products that were last modified, according to specific fields, Product Types or Attributes.
The Review Modified Products screen provides a list of all Products with differences between their published (current) and staged versions. It allows you to examine pending changes and take actions such as publishing, discarding, reverting or editing specific updates.
Additionally, Product Selections enables you to manage individual assortments across multiple sales channels, including brand sites and brick-and-mortar stores. You can also manage subsets of your catalog by customer segment, region or other criteria. This feature also allows you to create blocklists that exclude products or variants from a certain store/channel/market. Finally, A filter sidebar allows instant switching between selections, reducing errors and improving workflow efficiency.
With Store-fenced Permissions, you can assign access at the product selection level, allowing teams to edit only the catalogs relevant to their specific needs. This ensures tighter control, fewer errors and streamlined merchandising processes.
Product Tailoring takes it a step further by enabling you to manage market-specific product data for different brands or regions. That means you can tailor product information such as product names, descriptions, attributes or images for specific stores or customer groups without duplicating records, supporting localized and personalized product content at scale.
Last but not least, Recurring Orders enables you to configure multiple pricing strategies for each SKU: By currency, customer group or subscription interval. This set-up incentivizes recurring purchases with discounted pricing to drive loyalty and predictable revenue.
Get started with the enterprise-level platform for product catalog management
commercetools’ ability to manage complex product catalogs scenarios — such as detailed product data modeling, region-specific assortments and omnichannel consistency — ensures your brand can deliver exceptional customer experiences at scale. This empowers both developers and marketers to efficiently manage and optimize product data, meeting the unique demands of your business and customers — whether human or AI-based.
Brands like Christie Cookie Co., CHRONEXT, Interflora UK, SPORT 24 and Woolworths rely on commercetools’ robust product catalog capabilities to streamline operations and build customer loyalty.
With commercetools, your business can create highly flexible and dynamic product catalogs, delivering accurate and localized product information that enables customers to find and buy your products without friction.
To enrich your product catalog and discovery capabilities with commercetools, get in touch with our experts.
Mary Rebecca is a Senior Product Marketing Manager at commercetools, focused on B2C. With over a decade of experience across product and marketing teams, she excels at crafting GTM strategies and positioning products to drive growth and deliver value.