Product data rarely arrives “ready to use.” Unfortunately, it often shows up incomplete, missing important specs, inconsistent, or in the wrong file type.
At the same time, customers are already searching, comparing, and making decisions on channels where they can find product information. As a result, the biggest mistake teams make with product data isn't leaving it messy. It's waiting for perfection before taking action.
Because the reality is, messy data isn’t going anywhere. And while teams wait, products sit incomplete, hard to find, or missing entirely from the channels where customers are already making decisions.
For most teams, waiting on suppliers to deliver clean, structured data doesn't just cause one big delay — it creates hurdles throughout the entire onboarding process.
Without clean data to work from, teams improvise: Fill in what's available, flag what's missing, try to move things forward. Then, manual updates occur each time a new piece trickles in. The same product gets touched multiple times, often by different people.
That creates a steady stream of cleanup and rework just to get something live, only to repeatedly return to fix it later. Over time, that kind of manual grunt work can add up to some real loss in labor hours.
The impact of messy data is pretty straightforward:
If you’ve encountered this problem even just a handful of times, it’s easy to understand why distributors are on the lookout for workarounds.
That search often leads teams to consider a supplier portal. If bad data starts with suppliers, the thinking goes, then getting them to submit clean, structured data through a standardized system should solve the problem upstream.
Portals promise cleaner data upfront, reduce the need for internal cleanup, and shift internal responsibilities outward. Instead of constantly fixing issues after the fact, teams can set expectations early and enforce a single standard, ultimately creating a sense of control over how product information is structured and maintained.
But, there’s a big catch here: The approach relies on imposing order on chaos that you don’t fully control — i.e., the ways your suppliers choose to work and organize their products. Most already have their own systems, formats, and processes in place, so asking them to adopt another portal or conform to a new schema introduces friction right away.
Some may find it easy to comply, but others don’t. Many might just do enough to get through the process without fully aligning to your style.
Thus, instead of working with what’s available and improving it over time, portals turn data quality into a hard prerequisite. It’s one reason why supplier onboarding portals aren’t universally adopted, and even when they are, they don’t always deliver the expected results.
In fact, one poll by The Hackett Group found that only about a third of B2B companies use these systems, with nearly 40% of them reporting that they ultimately fell short of expectations.
If waiting on perfect supplier data is what slows things down, the alternative is straightforward: stop waiting.
Instead of trying to enforce consistency at the point of supplier submission, a product experience management (PXM) approach shifts the focus to working with the information your teams already have.
This holds true even when data arrives in different formats or levels of completeness, and often with better results than supplier portals.
Here are five benefits of using PXM to leverage data you already have:
Several tools can help accelerate this, particularly for extracting structured data. But the tool is ultimately secondary to embracing the process itself.
The real shift is deciding that inconsistent inputs are the baseline assumption — not the exception to manage around.
The debate over implementing a supplier portal often misses the point. The real question isn't how to get better data from suppliers, but how to keep moving forward without it.
Luckily for distributors, that's a solvable problem. And once you’ve solved it, you can stop waiting on suppliers entirely.