The holidays are approaching. Your seasonal assortment is ready, your inventory is arriving and you’ve planned all your promotions.
And then you open your product files.
Key attributes are missing. Product names vary between sources. Images do not meet marketplace rules. And hundreds or thousands of products need to be ready before holiday traffic picks up.
Suddenly, catalog preparation is a holiday bottleneck.
Peak season rewards speed, but not at the expense of product catalog quality. Incomplete product data can make products harder to discover and compare, delay marketplace approval and create fulfillment and customer support problems.
Catalog quality matters even more as shoppers change how they evaluate products. During the 2025 holiday season, nearly half (47%) of holiday shoppers used AI-powered tools (opens in a new tab) to compare prices, find gift ideas and make purchasing decisions, according to ICSC.
In this post, we’ll look at how AI can speed up product catalog preparation for peak season while human oversight helps maintain accuracy and quality.
Why catalog quality matters more during peak season
Product data influences each stage of holiday shopping.
Accurate product data helps shoppers find and compare products, gives marketplaces the information they need to categorize listings and gives customer support teams reliable answers when buyers have questions.
During peak season, eCommerce teams may need to launch seasonal products and go live on new marketplaces while managing much higher order volumes. Manually cleaning up every SKU eats time better spent on priorities such as hero products or listings with a history of rejections or returns.
AI can help eCommerce teams prepare catalogs (opens in a new tab) faster and at greater scale. Tools such as Mirakl Catalog Transformer (opens in a new tab) uses AI to extract product information from your whole catalog, automatically categorize products, fill in every possible attribute from your existing content and translate it when needed.
With the Image Transformation capability (opens in a new tab), your images are also reshaped to match each marketplace's requirements, so your entire catalog is fully marketplace-ready, with richer information, in time for peak season.
Catalog Transformer acts as your team's co-pilot, taking on the heavy lifting of catalog work, while your team stays fully in control to review, adapt, and approve content. That reclaimed time is valuable: it lets your experts focus on higher-impact work instead of repetitive catalog tasks.
Six ways AI-powered catalog tools prepare products for peak season
1. Audit the catalog and prioritize the work
AI can analyze large catalogs for missing attributes, taxonomy mismatches and products that previously failed to meet marketplace requirements.
AI tools will spot the gaps, but people still decide what deserves attention first. A seasonal bestseller with plenty of inventory, for example, probably warrants more attention than a low-volume product with the same data issue.
There’s no need to overhaul the entire product catalog at once. A seller with 50,000 SKUs could start with 500 high-priority holiday products across different categories and marketplaces. That smaller group can reveal problems to address before applying the same catalog preparation process (opens in a new tab) more broadly.
2. Standardize product data
Product data can come from spreadsheets, internal systems and manufacturers, each organizing information differently. Weight might appear in pounds in one source and ounces in another, while the same color could be called “navy,” “navy blue” or “dark blue.”
AI powered attribute extraction understands the full context of the product attributes and therefore can bring that information into a consistent format. It can convert measurements, standardize sizes and colors and recognize that “product color,” “color” and “shade” describe the same detail. That makes it easier to adapt product data to each marketplace without having to change every listing by hand.
3. Categorize products for each marketplace
Every marketplace classifies products in its own way, so the same item may belong in different categories or require different information.
AI-powered product categorization can help match products to the right marketplace categories and highlight uncertain matches for review. That means less manual categorization for sellers and more complete information for marketplaces.
However, some categorization decisions still need human review. For regulated products such as children’s toys, incorrect categorization can affect which safety and compliance requirements a marketplace applies to the listing.
4. Enrich product titles, descriptions and attributes
Once the basic product catalog structure is in place, AI can help improve listings by:
- Completing product attributes: AI-based attribute enrichment tools can use reliable source data to fill required fields such as dimensions, materials, compatibility, certifications and technical specs, then add useful optional details.
- Adapting content for each marketplace: AI content generation tools can adjust titles and descriptions to meet each marketplace’s content and formatting rules.
One important note: *AI should never fill in information it can’t verify*. Dimensions, ingredients, certifications, country of origin, performance claims and other factual details need reliable evidence behind them. If the data isn’t available, AI should flag it rather than make a guess.
5. Localize the catalog for global markets
Expanding a holiday assortment into another global market requires more than translating product descriptions. A listing may need centimeters instead of inches, regional sizing information or different wording for claims about a product’s performance or benefits.
AI-powered translation can provide a first pass by translating and adapting catalog content. Humans can then review areas where mistakes carry more risk, such as measurements (i.e. pounds vs. kilograms, Fahrenheit vs. Celsius).
This approach speeds up localization while leaving higher-risk decisions to people with local expertise.
6. Review and validate pre-launch, monitor post-launch
Before listings go live, AI-based catalog validation can help sellers catch errors and mark products for review.
- Verify product data before listings go live: AI tools can spot missing fields, prohibited language and low-quality images that could cause a marketplace to reject a listing.
- Give higher-risk products a closer look: Regulated or potentially risky claims may need thorough human review of every listing, while teams can spot-check lower-risk formatting changes.
- Learn from what happens after launch: Rejections, suppressed listings, repeated corrections and customer support issues can reveal product information that still needs attention.
What teams learn during peak season can improve how they prepare future launches.
A practical peak-season catalog prep plan
A simple countdown can keep product catalog preparation on track:
- 30 days before peak: Start with your most important seasonal products, find missing or inaccurate information and finalize what each marketplace requires.
- 14 days before peak: Test the process with a mix of products and markets, complete catalog updates and localization, then fix any issues that need human review.
- 7 days before peak: Publish the remaining products in batches, correct rejected listings and watch for products that are taken down or have data issues.
Once products go live, teams can see where the process still needs work by monitoring catalog completeness, rejected or suppressed listings and how long products take to publish. Return rates and customer support issues can also point to inaccurate product information.
How Mirakl helps transform catalog data at scale
The real test comes when sellers need to apply this work across different marketplaces. Preparing a product catalog once is one thing. Keeping product data accurate and ready for dozens of marketplace requirements is another.
Mirakl Connect (opens in a new tab) gives brands such as belle & bloom (opens in a new tab) and Ana Luisa (opens in a new tab) one system to manage their product catalog and inventory and keep listings fresh across more than 450 Mirakl-powered marketplaces.
AI-powered Catalog Transformer (opens in a new tab) brings all the capabilities we’ve discussed together. Retailers such as eyewear brand Caddis (opens in a new tab) and skincare brand Skin Research (opens in a new tab) are using Catalog Transformer to prepare product catalog data for different marketplaces while reducing the manual work involved in launching on new channels.
Turn peak preparation into a repeatable strategy
Peak-season readiness starts before campaigns launch, and catalog quality is a vital part of that preparation. AI-powered tools can accelerate the work, but reliable source data and human judgment keep it grounded.
Get that balance right for the holidays, and you’ll have a catalog process you can carry into the next marketplace launch and next year’s peak season.
Contact us today (opens in a new tab) to learn how Mirakl can help your team prepare and manage a higher-quality catalog across channels.
