Back in 2022, Salsify recognized an opportunity to build a new catalog solution to keep pace with the demands of our customers and the landscape. Customers wanted a solution that was more scalable, customizable, and analytics-driven.
We listened to your feedback and launched Salsify Catalog Sites, which we’ve continuously enhanced and expanded over the last four years.
To streamline your R&D focus and continue investing in our Catalog Sites product, we’re sunsetting our legacy Classic Catalog functionality on December 31, 2026.
That means Catalog Sites will become the go-to method for brands that want to share product information with trusted partners, distributors, customers, and other third parties outside their organization.
This update gives you a direct opportunity to modernize product information management (PIM), automate manual tasks, and build more accurate product feeds for your buyers. Cleaning up your data will also help you thrive in the world of agentic commerce, helping to create product experiences made for today’s digital commerce environment.
Isabella Volkmer, a product manager at Salsify, and Colin Reid, a technical account manager at Salsify, covered the upcoming changes during a session at the Digital Shelf Summit (DSS) 2026.
They were joined by Shaker Melhem, a product information specialist at Ergodyne, an early adopter of Catalog Sites and a Salsify customer that manufactures innovative safety work gear and jobsite safety solutions for construction, utilities, and industrial workers.
To help you prepare, this article will cover:
Read on to learn how to set your new system up for success and keep your product data accurate and consistent. Your account team is ready to assist you with any questions or support needed in your transition.
Catalog Sites introduce a more scalable, modern architecture to Classic Catalogs, bringing a streamlined, analytics-driven approach to sharing product information.
The solution simplifies administration, reduces manual work, and improves the user experience for partners, distributors, and internal teams. With Catalog Sites, brands can access new capabilities such as analytics, localization, and enhanced content that enable them to deliver modern, conversion-ready product experiences.
“We understood that in order to support more complex use cases, we needed to improve our architecture,” Volkmer says, adding that Catalog Sites delivers this value through more brand-focused capabilities.
Catalog Sites feature several improvements over Classic Catalogs:
There’s also stronger governance. Catalog Sites allow teams to only publish approved content, reducing the risk of product content errors.
Catalog Sites’ biggest benefit is how it automates information sharing across a brand’s ecosystem, turning product content access into a self-service experience.
Rather than relying on manual exports and executing case-by-case requests, teams can streamline this process. This is in large part because of investments Salsify has made over the last year in response to customer feedback and to better support an evolving digital shelf landscape.
Earlier this year, Salsify made updates to ensure its migration tooling automatically transferred every brand manufacturer’s templated exports, secured sites, and asset exports from Classic Catalogs to Catalog Sites.
Salsify also launched URL redirects to ensure anyone who lands on the old site is automatically redirected to Catalog Sites. It also added access logs last year and Enhanced Content support to Catalog Sites, Volkmer says.
She added that Catalog Sites now feature analytics that allow teams to see views and exports, so they better understand traffic to these pages and who is accessing them, which can support lead generation activities.
Additional touches such as personalized branding, streamlined, all-in-one admin capabilities, and a digital catalog experience round out the enhancements.
In a sign of the times, Catalog Sites now feature the option to make specific catalogs AEO-ready — optimized for generative AI engines like ChatGPT and Gemini.
It’s especially important to lean into how both AI search engines and autonomous agentic shopper tools impact your business. Simply put, your data has to be ready for AI. When your catalog is clear and organized, AI tools can easily find your products and recommend them to buyers.
This new feature automatically produces a new answer engine optimization (AEO) metadata package that makes it easier for AI crawlers and agents to understand and interpret the data within your catalog.
This, in turn, promotes faster indexing and stronger AI search engine authority
One brand manufacturer is already taking advantage of Catalog Sites to increase its efficiency and ensure product content consistency.
Melhem says Ergodyne had 30 to 40 Classic Catalogs, which they are actively migrating to Catalog Sites. His company worked with Salsify’s customer service team to plan its migration, first walking through a demo of Catalog Sites and then setting a migration date. Melhem says the process was easy and straightforward.
“All you really have to do is just publish all the catalogs you currently have in there,” he says.
Ergodyne has two main use cases for Catalog Sites. The team relies on the solution to distribute product information to external users and to support its logo program, where Ergodyne customers can customize its product materials and add their own logos.
With Catalog Sites, Melhem’s team no longer has to send static PDFs to marketing for manual updates. They can deliver a digital catalog experience that speeds the process, saving everyone involved significant time.
“It decreases a lot of those manual requests,” Melhem says. “It mitigates the manual process of having to always update your information and then resend it to either an external partner or somebody internally within your organization.”
During the DSS session, Reid shared a six-step roadmap to make the transition to Catalog Sites easy.
This simple framework helps you clean up your current setup, test a prototype, and switch over without slowing down your business.
Following these steps helps you maintain data continuity while making sure your product content is optimized for Agentic AI Search Engines.
Here are six ways that brands can successfully migrate to Catalog Sites.
"What does a successful migration actually look like? Just some ideas here: 100% adoption, your users are loving the catalogs, and you don't have any people bothering you with technical issues. That's the vision of what a successful migration could look like," Reid says.
As the December 31, 2026 deadline approaches, Reid added that Salsify will work hand-in-hand with customers to address potential hurdles and get them across the finish line.
Reid advises brands to audit their existing Classic Catalogs before migrating them.
“Maybe you have catalogs that no one's even looking at anymore. Maybe you have ones that could get merged into another nicer, consolidated version. Maybe there's some that you just want to hit the button and be done with it,” he says. “It's nice to take a step back and say, ‘Why do we have these? Who are we serving with these catalogs?’”
Salsify offers two ways to migrate. First, there are simple one-to-one migrations, where teams can just click a button and transition to Catalog Sites. Reid says the second option is a more complex consolidation, which is best suited for companies serving multiple regions that want to leverage localization.
Teams can work with Salsify’s customer service managers to determine what the best migration path is for them.
Rather than migrate everything at once, Reid suggested teams start with a single catalog and use this as a model. He calls this a “gold site,” which they can use to gather feedback internally, make adjustments, and then apply as a blueprint for subsequent catalogs they’ll migrate.
“Essentially, take one of those existing catalogs and copy it first,” he says. “After you've tested the site and you've got that gold site configured, you can leverage the migration tool to convert the remaining sites.”
Managers and leaders also need to focus on effective change management. Reid says leaders will need to continually communicate the shift to Catalog Sites to build awareness internally.
Training is also critical to nurture buy-in. Managers and leaders can use starter guides Salsify has created or things like short-form video tutorials and step-by-step demos to educate and train their teams.
For global organizations, a phased rollout could be the best approach.
“Maybe start rolling out your lesser-used catalogs first as a test — just to see if things are going to go well. Then, get that early feedback to tweak your configuration,” Reid says.
Whether a brand chooses to roll out Catalog Sites in phases or all at once, the value they’ll reap will be apparent immediately. This is what Ergodyne has experienced. In one month alone, the company had close to 800 exports from its Catalog Sites — a process it would have previously handled manually.
“It's very much like a website. You'll click on the product, you'll have the PDP page, and you'll have all the information that you decided to include in there with your properties,” Melhem says about Catalog Sites.
“It’s very nice to just use it as a way to create a mini website, per se. It mitigates a lot of that output of information that has to go externally to either clients or your internal team that doesn’t have access to Salsify."