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The product your customer sees is called “Men’s jeans 32×32.” But the fit filter failed, stripping the title of one key detail: slim. Now those jeans are back in the warehouse. And your (former) customer is shopping somewhere else, where they can find a more reliable fit.
Multiply this by hundreds of SKUs selling across dozens of channels, and category mismatches can have a big impact across conversion, returns, ad waste, and lost profit. It often starts with the first step: uploading a product catalog to a marketplace. That quiet data translation decides what shoppers see, how items appear in filters, and whether ads and inventory match what’s actually in stock. Depending on how it goes, that one step is where visibility, accuracy, and trust are either built, or begin to unravel.
Nearly 75% of retailer and brand leaders say they make decisions on incomplete or inconsistent data. And almost half say their workflow is predominantly manual. The jeans lesson is just one example of how that incomplete/inconsistent data can have big impacts. Strong product catalog management keeps that fit signal intact from the start.
Now add AI to the mix. AI adoption is moving fast from pilot projects into daily operations—41% of retailers and 29% of brands are already using automation across multiple functions. But the same leaders who are betting on AI also admit they’re struggling with too many manual processes (49% of retailers, 62% of brands) and poor data quality (91% of retailers, 78% of brands). While their instinct might be to use AI to solve those poor data problems, in practice it can be a disastrous combination: if the data is bad, AI can’t fix it. Instead, the errors multiple more quickly, and at scale.
AI doesn’t know what’s right. It only knows what it’s fed. If attributes are missing, titles are wrong, or inventory is out of sync, AI will double down on the wrong signals. Campaigns chase SKUs that don’t exist. Forecasts build on bad assumptions. Dashboards tell a confident story that isn’t true.
AI helps you move fast. But if your data is off, you’ll just move fast in the wrong direction.
What is product catalog management and why does it matter?
Product catalog management is the work of organizing, enriching, and updating product data so every channel shows accurate titles, attributes, images, and availability. Done well, it keeps fit, size, and inventory signals consistent across marketplaces and stores, which reduces returns and lifts conversion. When mapping is off, the signals you rely on to drive sales—like fit, size, and availability—get scrambled. The systems built to help you automate, optimize, and scale are now running on broken inputs.
AI multiplies whatever it is fed. When titles, attributes, and availability tell the same story across every channel, automation feels invisible. Whereas the right product appears in the right filter, ads stop pointing to dead ends, and the jeans find the right buyer the first time. Treat the product catalog as the single source of truth, and the rest follows.
The jeans lesson: When fit drops in your product catalog, returns rise
During mapping in the jeans example above, the fit attribute never carried over. “Slim” vanished from the listing. The product dropped out of fit filters, and the title shrunk to “Men’s jeans 32×32” instead of “Men’s slim jeans 32×32.” Shoppers chose the wrong cut, through no fault of their own. This is a real pattern when marketplaces expect fit in the title to guide choice, and that signal gets lost during product catalog mapping.
While this is happening, campaigns keep funding the hero SKU because the inventory feed is behind. Traffic lands on a product that isn’t available in some regions, so clicks climb without orders. Two problems, two data sources, one root cause: inputs that don’t agree with each other.
Once the listing is clear, the question shifts from “Does it show up?” to “Is it worth it?” That’s where Profitability Benchmarking comes in. It’s a 2025 focus area now in pilot with strategic Rithum clients. It works at the level where decisions matter: the SKU and its variations. It stops bad signals before they scale by checking the data your AI will use first. Instead of trimming a category because returns look high in aggregate, you see which sizes or washes are doing the damage and why.
Often the culprit is simple: missing fit language, a weak size chart, a title that doesn’t carry the signal a marketplace needs. Working with returns intelligence and RithumIQ, Profitability Benchmarking ties return spikes to the specific attributes and titles that need correction, so teams fix the source data first. Once the inputs are repaired, AI reinforces the right patterns instead of the wrong ones. In practice, you fix a few problem SKUs and keep the rest of the product catalog selling, now powered by clean signals.
How RithumIQ and AI Magic Mapper quietly do the heavy lifting
If your product catalog is clear, then search, filters, and ads fall into place. RithumIQ keeps the product catalog clear. RithumIQ serves as the intelligence engine across the Rithum platform and reads product data the way marketplaces do, across language and local rules. AI Magic Mapper uses that intelligence at scale so items land where they should and stay there as category standards change. Returns intelligence works alongside Profitability Benchmarking, which then reads outcomes at SKU and variant level, connecting return spikes and conversion dips to real, fixable causes. These are tools that protect data quality and use AI efficiently to enhance decisions from a solid data background.
When automation runs on shaky foundations, it scales the mess instead of the value. With Rithum’s help, you can get AI that solves problems. Talk to us to find out how.
Sebastian Spiegler is Head of Artificial Intelligence at Rithum.
