In most distribution businesses the catalogue team is one person who also does something else. That is workable at a few hundred products and becomes the constraint on growth somewhere between two and five thousand. The useful exercise is to name the functions before you name the people, because the functions exist whether or not anybody owns them.
The four functions
Acquisition. Getting product information out of suppliers and into your systems. The most time-consuming function and the most automatable.
Curation. Deciding what good looks like: category structure, which attributes matter, what a complete record contains, how descriptions are written. This is a judgement role and it is the one most often left unfilled.
Production. Writing, editing, cropping, checking. The visible work.
Publishing. Approving, syncing to channels, checking it rendered correctly, handling the things that break.
Every catalogue has all four happening. The question is only whether anybody has been made responsible for them.
One person doing all four
Under roughly 2 000 products with a stable supplier base, one person can hold all four functions, and there are real advantages: no handover cost, complete context, fast decisions.
Two things must be managed. First, curation gets squeezed — it is the only function without a deadline, so it loses to production every time, and the category structure quietly decays. Book it as recurring time rather than hoping it happens. Second, everything the person knows exists nowhere else. Encode decisions in the system as rules and configurations rather than leaving them as habits.
Splitting at scale
The first split is almost always acquisition from the rest, because acquisition is the largest volume and the most mechanical. It can be automated, outsourced or given to a junior with a clear checklist.
The second split is curation from production, and it is the one businesses get wrong. Curation is a small time commitment and a large capability requirement — it needs someone who understands the products and the buyers. Production is the opposite. Combining them means either an expensive person doing data entry, or an inexpensive person making structural decisions.
| Catalogue size | Typical shape |
|---|---|
| Under 2 000 | One person, all four functions, curation time booked |
| 2 000–10 000 | One production person, one part-time curator (often a category manager) |
| 10 000–50 000 | Two or three production, a dedicated curator, automated acquisition |
| Over 50 000 | A team with a manager, plus a defined publishing gate |
The role everyone forgets
The forgotten function is curation, and its absence has a recognisable signature.
- The category tree has grown organically and nobody can explain it
- The same attribute has three different names in three categories
- Nobody can say what "complete" means, so nobody can say whether the catalogue is improving
- Every new supplier is onboarded slightly differently
These are all symptoms of production happening without curation. The work gets done; it just accumulates inconsistency, and the cost of that inconsistency lands two years later on whoever tries to add filtering to the storefront.
Curation is perhaps four hours a month at 5 000 products. Skipping it costs a quarter of remediation work later.
Where the publishing gate belongs
One structural decision matters more than the org chart: who may publish to the live storefront.
The failure mode at both extremes is familiar. If everybody can publish, incomplete records reach customers and nobody notices until one does. If only one person can publish, that person becomes a bottleneck and colleagues find ways around them, which is worse because it creates false confidence in a gate that is not actually holding.
The workable arrangement is that production staff prepare and mark ready, and a smaller group publishes — with the completeness score visible at the point of approval, so the decision takes seconds rather than requiring a full re-read.
Common questions
- How many people do you need to run a product catalogue?
- Under 2 000 products, one person covering all four functions. Between 2 000 and 10 000, one production person plus a part-time curator, often a category manager. Between 10 000 and 50 000, two or three production staff, a dedicated curator and automated acquisition. Over 50 000, a team with a manager and a defined publishing gate.
- What does a product data curator actually do?
- Decides what good looks like: the category structure, which attributes matter, what a complete record contains and how descriptions are written. It is a small time commitment and a large capability requirement — it needs someone who understands both the products and the buyers.
- Who should be allowed to publish products to the storefront?
- Neither everybody nor one person. If everybody can publish, incomplete records reach customers. If only one person can, they become a bottleneck and colleagues route around them, which is worse because the gate looks like it is holding when it is not. Production staff prepare and mark ready; a smaller group publishes, with the completeness score visible at the point of approval.
Where to next
Who wrote this
The Smart Station team
Written by the engineering and delivery team at Smart Station (Pty) Ltd, the South African software company that builds GetShopSync. The material here comes from building catalogue systems for distributors — it is what we have measured and what we have got wrong, not a survey of the literature.