Valoreo designs its Akeneo PIM for Latin American marketplaces

Valoreo was a Mexico-based ecommerce aggregator that acquired and grew consumer brands selling on Amazon, Mercado Libre and other marketplaces across Latin America. As its portfolio grew, product data was spread across spreadsheets, the NetSuite ERP and a marketplace integration platform, and every new brand added complexity. In 2022, Valoreo asked Synolia to design its Product Information Management (PIM) project on Akeneo, from the discovery workshops to the target architecture and product data model.

The challenge: one catalog, many sets of rules

Each system held part of the truth. NetSuite managed items, accounting data and stock. A small catalog team maintained marketing content in Google Sheets. Marketplace titles, categories and specific attributes lived in the integration platform.

Every marketplace had its own rules: different titles, whether the title could appear in the description, whether emojis were allowed, and its own category tree (Amazon alone has tens of thousands of categories). Relations between products, such as kits, substitutes and twin items, were tracked in extra spreadsheet columns, and brand names, colors and sizes were not spelled the same way in every system.

Valoreo set three priorities: replace the spreadsheets with a real product data platform, manage relations between products properly, and make it easier to publish to the marketplaces that the integration platform did not cover.

The brief

One source of truth for product data across brands, countries and marketplaces, with clear ownership for each team and clean feeds to every sales channel.

Synolia x Akeneo

Valoreo had shortlisted several PIM solutions and selected Akeneo, in its SaaS Growth Edition.

The project was run in Spanish by Synolia’s team in Santiago, Chile, with a project manager and a PIM architect, drawing on more than ten years of Akeneo projects at Synolia.

Our scope: discovery workshops, product modeling, target architecture, data initialization plan, and functional and technical specifications.

Discovery workshops: modeling products for marketplaces

The workshops brought together the catalog, marketing and sourcing teams, the people who create, enrich and buy the products. Together we worked through the questions that shape any PIM for marketplace sellers:

• Product models and variants: how NetSuite parent items and their children map to Akeneo product models, and which variation axes (size, color, model) each family uses.
• Channels or attributes: whether each marketplace should be an Akeneo channel, or share channels with marketplace-specific attribute groups. Both options were compared on real product examples.
• Ownership: attribute groups aligned with the teams that fill them, so everyone knows which fields are theirs.
• Locales and completeness: four locales, with completeness rules so that a product only goes to a marketplace once its data is complete.
• Associations: kits, substitutes and twin items modeled as Akeneo associations instead of spreadsheet columns.

A target architecture with Akeneo at the center

The target design gave each system a clear role. Products are created in NetSuite, which remains the reference for accounting and stock. Each team then enriches them in Akeneo, and Akeneo feeds the marketplace integration platform and the Shopify stores. A later version of the specifications went one step further and placed Akeneo between NetSuite and the integration platform, as the single place where product information is consolidated.

The data initialization plan covered the full extraction of existing listings, their transformation into Akeneo’s format, consolidation with ERP data and the connection of the systems, with the goal of turning the transformation into a near-automatic job.

Lessons for multi-marketplace sellers

• Start from the marketplaces’ rules: titles, categories and required attributes differ from one marketplace to the next, and the product model has to absorb them.
• Decide channels versus attributes early: it drives the whole structure of the PIM.
• Clean master data first: brands, colors and sizes spelled differently in each system will follow you into the PIM.
• Give each team its attributes: clear ownership is what replaces the shared spreadsheet.
• Use completeness as the gate to publish: incomplete products never reach a marketplace.

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