Case Study: E-commerce Product Upload Automation

This initiative originated from one of our Automation Audits conducted for an e-commerce company specializing in online sales through PrestaShop.

The analysis revealed a common yet underestimated problem: the manual uploading of products was a major operational bottleneck, consuming time, resources, and human effort. Each new item required a series of repetitive actions like filling in product sheets, entering codes, uploading images, and optimizing SEO, resulting in an average monthly cost exceeding €6,000, not to mention the constant risk of data entry errors and inconsistencies.

Although highly skilled, the administrative team was trapped in outdated manual procedures that slowed down catalog publication and limited scalability. In practice, the company’s growth was directly proportional to the time wasted.

Objective

The goal of the project was to transform a time and labor-intensive process into a fully automated and scalable workflow, capable of:

• Drastically reducing management costs associated with manual product uploads;
• Accelerating time-to-market, enabling new items to be published within hours instead of days;
• Improving the quality and consistency of product data, eliminating typing errors and discrepancies between documents and product sheets;
• Integrating automation seamlessly into the company’s existing administrative processes without disrupting internal systems or workflows;
• Freeing up staff from repetitive work so they could focus on higher-value activities such as pricing, marketing, and performance analysis.

The objective was not purely technical, but organizational and strategic: making e-commerce growth sustainable by removing the limitations of manual labor.

Automation Description

The solution was designed as an AI-driven workflow integrated with both the company’s management system and PrestaShop’s API, creating a fully autonomous and intelligent product update process.

The system was configured to:

• Automatically read incoming delivery notes (DDTs) and extract key data (product codes, quantities, descriptions, categories, brands), converting them into JSON objects compatible with the PrestaShop API.
• Analyze product images using computer vision models to recognize visual features and generate titles, descriptions, and SEO metadata consistent with the company’s editorial guidelines.
• Upload products automatically, including images, technical data sheets, and variations, through the API, ensuring data validation before publication.
• Manage updates intelligently: when a product already exists, the system automatically updates quantities, descriptions, or prices, preventing duplication or inconsistencies.

The result is a fully automated end-to-end workflow capable of **uploading hundreds of products in minutes, maintaining consistent quality and full data control.

Results

The impact of the automation was immediate and measurable:

• Operational costs were reduced by 95%, from roughly €6,000 per month to under €300, mostly for maintenance and supervision.
• Product publication time dropped from several days to a few hours**, enabling real-time catalog updates based on incoming DDTs.
• Almost complete elimination of data entry errors, thanks to structured data extraction and supervised language generation.
• Faster decision-making: the marketing team can now test new product categories and pricing strategies without technical delays.
• Reallocation of administrative staff to higher-value activities such as creating seasonal bundles, planning promotions, and analyzing sales margins.

In summary, the company turned a costly and time-consuming process into an intelligent pipeline capable of supporting growth without increasing operational costs.

Beyond financial savings, the project delivered a tangible competitive advantage: greater speed, stronger data consistency, and a more efficient product management process essential elements for any e-commerce business aiming to scale sustainably.