What's your experience with new item setups? What causes delays for you?
I've never seen two companies handle new item setup the same way. Everything is different across the products, teams and the systems. But I've been in e-com for over 7 years and always see similar friction points.
Receiving a basic PDF instead of a real data file.. pretty painful for something that needs lots of child products. Now you're doing a bunch of back-and-forth with the supplier just to understand what's actually being sold.
Assets aren't ready. It's nice to have room, and time for revisions.
At bigger companies, the e-commerce team is downstream of a dedicated product team that has a queue based on regions. There are sign-off bottlenecks, and the calendar changes because of a shift in priorities, then your e-commerce team absorbs the delay.
Data errors are annoying, and could have been caught earlier. Causing suppressed listings or retailer validation failures.
How are you all shoring up processes to avoid all this? Is it constant? Or is this simply something we all have to accept and try to limit?
How often does cross-functional education need to be done?
What are the biggest bottlenecks you are dealing with? Supplier data, internal process, platform/portal issues...?