A retailer with thousands of SKUs from dozens of suppliers almost always faces the same pain: each supplier sends a catalog in its own format - an Excel file with arbitrary columns, an export from 1C, or a PDF price list. A manager manually turns this into product cards, and then those same cards are manually duplicated to the website, mobile app, and marketplaces. At every copying step, discrepancies appear: one price on the website, another on Wildberries, and the package volume in the app does not match the marketplace card. Returns grow, conversion drops, and the team spends days on reconciliation.
Akeneo PIM (Product Information Management) solves this problem as a category. Below is an open look at what retail chains and e-commerce teams do with this tool, with links to the vendor's public materials. This is not a KT.Team case study, but a capabilities overview.
Problem: supplier catalog != retailer model
The root of the discrepancies is that supplier data never matches the retailer's data model. One uses “net weight, g,” another uses “Weight,” and a third has the weight embedded in the name. As long as mapping happens in a manager's head and in Excel formulas, it is not reproducible: a new employee will do it differently, and the error will surface through a channel.
Akeneo introduces a separate layer for this - Supplier Data Manager. The supplier gets portal access by invitation, uploads their file, and maps their attributes to the retailer's catalog requirements themselves. The AI-based system pre-validates the data, catches errors before import, and also categorizes and normalizes values. According to Akeneo, customers using this scenario get “70% more task automation and 75 hours saved per person per month” (Akeneo Supplier Data Manager). The business value is straightforward: onboarding a new supplier and new assortment stops being a manual task and becomes a controlled process with a measurable SLA.
A single source of truth instead of channel copies
After onboarding, the data lives in one model. Akeneo states the principle directly: “you need a single system of record for all products, all teams, and all channels” (Akeneo Omnichannel). The key mechanism here is the concept of channels and locales. The same product is stored once, but each channel gets its own tailored presentation: a long description for the website, a short one for the mobile app, and images in the required format for each storefront.
This is the answer to discrepancies. Price, weight, composition, and brand are attributes of a single record. Change them in one place, and they change everywhere the product is distributed. The channel no longer stores its own copy of the data; it only receives a slice from the center. Akeneo calls this “unified, but not uniform” - one data set, different presentation by channel.
Product distribution: website, app, marketplaces
From the unified product model, cards reach storefronts in three ways: API connectors to e-commerce platforms (Shopify, Adobe Commerce, BigCommerce), Akeneo Syndication for marketplace feeds, and extensions from the Akeneo App Store. Akeneo states support for “500+ retailers and marketplaces” - Amazon, eBay, Walmart, Zalando, and others (PIM and Syndication).
An important detail for retail: each channel sets its own product card requirements, including required fields, formats, and categories. Akeneo checks data completeness for a specific channel and automatically formats the export to match its rules. A product missing attributes required by Amazon simply will not pass as “ready” - this prevents rejected listings and empty storefront fields before publication.
The key architectural split: PIM handles enrichment and quality, while syndication handles delivery. Akeneo emphasizes that syndication is “dangerous without PIM” because bad data otherwise spreads to all channels at once. Quality is fixed at the source, and then distributed from there.
What this delivers for the business
For retail and e-commerce, the benefit is measured in three metrics. First is assortment onboarding speed: a new supplier comes in through a portal, not through email threads and manual reconciliation. Second is the absence of price and attribute discrepancies between channels: a change in one place becomes consistent everywhere instantly, reducing returns and complaints. Third is scalability: adding a new channel means configuring a slice of existing data, not creating another catalog copy.
Process flow
Supplier → Supplier Data Manager portal (file upload, attribute mapping, AI validation and normalization) → unified data model in Akeneo PIM (one product = one set of attributes, completeness checks for each channel) → distribution of slices: API connector to the website, separate view in the mobile app, Syndication feeds to marketplaces. Any attribute change happens centrally and automatically reaches all storefronts.
Business takeaway
Redesign the process so supplier data enters the system once through controlled onboarding, and each storefront receives a slice from a single source rather than its own copy. Then “price discrepancies between the website and the marketplace” stop being an incident class: there is nowhere for them to arise technically, because there are no catalog copies anymore - there is one product and its channel-specific representations.
