Spreadsheets are where most product data starts — and where it quietly starts to cost you. Here's when to switch, what Excel really costs, and how the migration works without chaos.
Almost every retailer starts product management in a spreadsheet. It's flexible, everyone knows it, and for a single supplier and one channel it works fine. The trouble starts quietly — one more supplier, one more marketplace, one more colleague editing the same file — until most of the week goes into keeping the spreadsheets straight instead of improving the assortment.
Excel has no licence fee, so its cost is invisible — until you add it up: the hours spent reformatting and re-researching, the revenue lost when incomplete products rank badly or get rejected by a marketplace, and the channels you never open because the data isn't ready. That's the real bill.
| Criterion | Excel | PIM (Productbay) |
|---|---|---|
| Multiple supplier formats | manual copy-paste | import + normalization |
| Data quality | error-prone | completeness score, validation |
| Multiple channels | one file per channel | maintain once, publish everywhere |
| Teamwork & approval | version chaos | roles, changelog, workflow |
| Enrichment | by hand | AI Autofill |
You don't have to migrate the whole catalog to be productive. Start with one supplier and one channel, then expand — no big-bang go-live, no project risk.
Most switches take days to a few weeks. Productbay is priced by catalog size and channels — a predictable monthly fee instead of Excel's hidden cost. It's built for multi-brand specialist retailers, from smaller shops to large enterprise ones, without requiring a dedicated data team.
Book a demo — we'll import one of your real supplier files and show you the difference in minutes.
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