Key Takeaways 💡
- Manual marketplace management is unsustainable for fashion brands.
Managing multiple variants, seasonal updates, and platform-specific requirements manually leads to errors, inefficiencies, and burnout. - 91% of consumers begin their product search on marketplaces.
If your listings aren't there—or aren't optimized—you’re missing high-intent shoppers. - Automation unlocks scalability and profitability.
With platforms like ChannelEngine, you can centralize operations, sync inventory, automate returns, and enrich listings to scale faster with fewer errors. - Strategic partners like Brandsom maximize automation's value.
They combine ChannelEngine’s tech with smart strategies and AI tools to optimize content, boost SEO, and accelerate market expansion. - Real brands are already reaping the rewards.
Crazy Safety cut manual errors by over 30% and reduced time spent on operational tasks by 40% after automating with ChannelEngine. - The future of ecommerce is predictive and AI-powered.
Automating now positions your brand to leverage dynamic pricing, trend-based inventory, and localized experiences in the near future.
Selling on online marketplaces has never been more important—or more complex. For fashion brands looking to scale across multiple platforms, keeping up with product listings, inventory updates, and order flows is a constant juggling act. You're working with multiple sizes, colors, seasonal changes, and constantly evolving collections. If you're doing all this manually, you're setting your team up for burnout and your business up for inefficiencies.
And consumers are already far ahead. In our research, we found that 91% of shoppers start their product search on marketplaces, not search engines. That means if your products aren't on marketplaces, shoppers won’t find them when they're ready to buy. This makes managing your marketplace operations efficiently and accurately even more crucial.
And, this is where automation comes in. Smart marketplace automation is no longer a "nice-to-have." It's essential for you to scale, reduce costly errors, and stay competitive.
That's why more and more brands like yours are turning to platforms like ChannelEngine and strategic partners like Brandsom. Together, we give you the tools and guidance to manage complex operations, streamline workflows, and focus your time where it counts—on growth.
Why manual marketplace management is unsustainable
As a fashion brand, you deal with unique challenges. Each product often comes in a range of sizes, colors, fabrics, and styles. Managing this complexity means dealing with parent-child product relationships, updating individual variants, and making sure every item has the right metadata, imagery, and descriptions, tailored to each marketplace’s unique requirements.
Additionally, you're juggling seasonal updates, regional preferences, and fast-moving trends. Trying to stay on top of all this manually is unsustainable.
Manually updating product listings, adjusting prices, syncing stock, or managing returns eats up valuable time—and opens the door to costly mistakes. And if you've ever had to restructure a product tree because of a platform mismatch, you know how easily things can go wrong. If you're expanding across multiple marketplaces, these manual processes simply can’t keep up with your growth goals.
Without automation, you end up spending more time fixing avoidable issues than focusing on what really matters—delivering a great experience and driving performance. It slows your momentum, impacts your margins, and limits your ability to scale smartly.
How automation unlocks efficiency and profitability
Once you’ve seen how unsustainable manual marketplace management can be, the value of automation becomes crystal clear. It’s not just about saving time—it’s about removing the friction that slows down your growth and increases operational costs.
When you automate your marketplace operations, everything changes.
- You centralize product data, making updates fast and consistent.
- Your inventory stays synced across all channels in real time.
- Listings are enriched and accurate, improving customer experience.
- Returns and order flows are handled automatically.
The result? Fewer errors, faster go-to-market, and less time spent on repetitive tasks.
You can grow into new marketplaces and regions without needing to build out your team just to handle repetitive operational tasks. Empower your team to focus on higher-value work like strategy, expansion, and performance. And with fewer mistakes, your return rates drop and customer satisfaction improves, boosting your bottom line.
🎥 Watch: How marketplace automation drives cost, speed & performance gains
In this short video from our partner Brandsom, Livia Hallahan-Hutchins, Sales Manager at Brandsom, explains how marketplace automation helps lower operational costs, boost performance across key KPIs, and accelerate time to market.
From automating manual tasks like order and return flows to using AI for faster product onboarding, discover how the right automation can unlock efficiency, scale, and profitability.
How ChannelEngine supports your marketplace automation
Once you’re ready to move away from manual operations, you need the right technology partner to make it happen. ChannelEngine is a marketplace software integration platform that connects your systems to global marketplaces—like Amazon, Zalando, bol, and dozens more—through a single, powerful integration.
- Manage all your marketplace listings in one place, with built-in support for regional and language-specific adaptations
- Keep your product content, pricing, and inventory perfectly synced in real time across all channels
- Easily manage parent-child product structures like sizes, colors, and bundles—even when platforms treat them differently
- Automate key processes like order routing, fulfillment, and returns
- Use AI-powered category mapping and smart filters to reduce time spent on onboarding and optimize your listings faster
- Tap into built-in features for dynamic pricing, product segmentation, and content customization at scale
No more switching between platforms or updating listings one by one. ChannelEngine gives you full control from one place, helping you sell more efficiently at scale.
And the time savings are significant.
For most channels, ChannelEngine knows the commissions & VAT for the products, so you can take this into your min price to never get any surprises at the finance meetings. When you sell, you make your margins.”
Robert Grundeken,
To get even more value from automation, many brands work with one of our certified partners, like Brandsom - they don’t just help you implement automation; they help you align it with your business goals and growth plans.
How Brandsom brings strategy to your automation
While automation solves operational pain points, having a smart strategy behind it is what drives real growth. That’s where Brandsom comes in.
Brandsom leverages automation to do the heavy lifting so that their teams can focus on strategic initiatives that drive real growth. They combine ChannelEngine’s automation features with their own AI-driven tools to help brands like yours operate smarter, faster, and more profitably.
For instance, they actively leverage ChannelEngine’s AI-powered category mapping, which cuts up to 30% of time spent on one of the most repetitive onboarding tasks. Their in-house team developed an AI-powered content creation tool that allows their content specialists to spend more time on keyword selection. This way, they not only decrease your time to market but also free up their team to identify the best-performing keywords and boost your sales rank.
Instead of spending hours on copywriting and category mapping, they spend time expanding your reach into new markets, optimizing Amazon keywords, and improving your overall sales rank. This is how automation and AI turn into real strategy.
Thijs Verhoef, 
Don’t take our word for it - Here’s how brands like yours are scaling smarter
1. Petrol Industries (Fashion/Apparel)
Petrol Industries used automation to grow efficiently across multiple marketplaces in Europe. They reduced time spent on manual updates and launched new channels faster.
Daniel Gonzales Docal,Digital Director
2. Crazy Safety (Child safety helmets & accessories)
Crazy Safety saw a significant drop in manual errors and time spent on operational tasks. Automation helped them stay agile during high-demand seasons.
Kim Møller-NielsenCEO, Partner, and Co-founder
3. Brabantia (Home goods)
Brabantia improved inventory accuracy, cut back on return-related issues, and increased profitability by connecting automation with a smarter sales strategy.
Brabantia took marketplace performance to the next level by using automation to streamline product updates and deliver tailored content across channels. With more efficient operations, they were able to expand reach and stay focused on what matters most—brand consistency and customer experience.
Mart van der Zanden, E-commerce Manager
The future of marketplace automation
AI in ecommerce is moving beyond onboarding and listing updates. Soon, tools will be able to predict inventory demand, adjust pricing dynamically, and tailor product offerings to local trends—automatically. It’s not science fiction; it’s the next evolution of marketplace selling.
That’s why investing in automation today is about more than efficiency—it’s about future-proofing your business. If you adopt early, you’ll gain an edge in speed, scale, and strategic insight. If you wait? You risk falling behind your competitors who are already automating their way to growth.
ChannelEngine gives you the foundation to do just that. As a powerful marketplace integration platform, it's built to support complex fashion assortments across dozens of global channels. And with a strategic partner like Brandsom—one of the certified experts in our partner network—you can connect that technology to a smart, tailored marketplace strategy.
Talk to Brandsom to build a marketplace strategy that fits your goals, products, and ambitions.
