Closing the Product Data Gap in B2B eCommerce: How Trustana Helps Manufacturers and Distributors Build Catalog Infrastructure at Scale

For manufacturers and distributors managing large, complex product catalogs, the gap between the data that exists and the data that commerce systems actually need is one of the most persistent infrastructure challenges in B2B eCommerce: supplier files arrive incomplete, specifications are scattered across PDFs and legacy systems, and attributes are inconsistent across categories and sources, which means the burden of closing that gap falls on product teams that would otherwise be driving digital revenue. Trustana was built to close that gap, and the B2B eCommerce Association is pleased to welcome the company as a vendor partner.

Trustana is an AI-powered product data enrichment platform that helps B2B and industrial businesses turn fragmented, incomplete product data into structured, accurate, and searchable catalog content at scale. The platform works alongside existing PIMs, ERPs, and ecommerce systems rather than replacing them, acting as an enrichment layer that improves data quality before it flows downstream to search, discovery, and buying experiences. For B2BEA’s community of digital commerce leaders across manufacturing, distribution, and wholesale, the addition brings a focused, practical perspective on one of the infrastructure problems that determines whether digital programs actually scale.

About Trustana

Trustana was founded in 2020 and operates globally, serving mid-market manufacturers, distributors, retailers, and marketplaces with complex product catalogs. The company is led by CEO Rebecca Xing, who spent her early career at BCG before moving into product management at startups focused on supply chain and warehouse management systems. Trustana itself began as a B2B marketplace, where the team experienced firsthand what poor product data does to a cross-border commerce operation. That experience shaped the company’s focus: when large language models matured, Trustana pivoted from operating the marketplace to selling the data platform that had been built to make it work. Trustana is backed by Temasek and was recognized by Forrester as a 2025 Tech Innovator for Retail.

Xing shared her perspective on the product data challenge in a recent B2BEA conversation, where she made the case that manufacturers and distributors with B2B catalogs face a harder version of this problem than B2C operators do. “If you’re selling a piece of clothing, if you don’t have very good product data, it’s not that bad, as long as you have an image,” she said. “But that’s super different when you’re talking about a replacement part for your car. The amount of data that you need on that part is much, much longer of a list. If you don’t have that data, it affects your capability to be effective in the rest of your tech stack, including for AI initiatives.” The full conversation is available here: Rebecca Xing on Closing the Product Data Gap for B2B Manufacturers and Distributors.

The platform addresses the full enrichment workflow: ingesting data from supplier spreadsheets, PDF specifications, and existing catalog records, filling in missing attributes, standardizing values across categories, and generating consistent product content aligned to the organization’s taxonomy and channel requirements. The integration posture is deliberate. Trustana is not designed to replace the systems manufacturers and distributors already have. It operates as an enrichment layer inside existing stacks, so teams can improve product data quality at scale without rebuilding their technology infrastructure. Vallen, a long-established leader in industrial MRO and safety equipment distribution, achieved 85% faster product onboarding and reduced operational costs after deploying Trustana to support their eCommerce expansion. Trustana’s full profile is available in the B2BEA Technology Directory.

How Trustana Helps Manufacturers and Distributors

Trustana’s work addresses the operational layer that determines whether digital commerce investments deliver. The platform supports manufacturers and distributors across five areas that matter most when catalog scale and complexity are high:

• Unify product data from multiple sources by ingesting supplier spreadsheets, PDFs, feeds, and internal records into a single, consistent view of each product, with no requirement that suppliers change how they deliver data.
• Fill missing attributes and standardize specifications by identifying gaps in product records and generating structured attribute values aligned to the organization’s taxonomy, reducing the manual effort that typically falls to product teams.
• Generate consistent product content at scale, producing descriptions, titles, and supporting content that are complete, formatted for the channel or system where they will appear, and differentiated from manufacturer copy.
• Prepare product data for AI-driven discovery by structuring product records to support semantic search, AI recommendation engines, and agentic commerce environments where machine-readable attributes determine whether products are found and recommended.
• Operate inside existing PIM, ERP, and ecommerce stacks as an enrichment layer rather than a replacement, so teams can improve data quality without disrupting the systems and workflows already in place.

The platform is built for the environments most B2B practitioners will recognize: catalogs with hundreds of thousands of SKUs, supplier data in inconsistent formats, and product teams stretched between manual cleanup and the strategic work that actually grows digital revenue. Trustana is in active deployment with manufacturers and distributors across industrial supply, MRO, and other technical categories where catalog complexity is high and the cost of poor product data shows up in search performance, onboarding time, and conversion rates.

Insights from the Trustana Team

Supplier Product Data Management: Fix Supplier Spreadsheets and Scale Product Onboarding

Supplier data rarely arrives in usable form. Column names are inconsistent across vendors. Images arrive in folders with file names that do not match SKU numbers. Units of measure vary within the same product category. Descriptions are copied from manufacturer PDFs and duplicated across multiple suppliers. When this happens at scale, across dozens of suppliers and hundreds of thousands of SKUs, the cost falls on whoever is responsible for getting products online. And it compounds with every new catalog cycle: what took a few minutes per import begins to demand hours every week before a single product can be published.

Effective supplier product data management follows four stages: collect data in whatever format suppliers use, standardize it against the organization’s internal taxonomy, enrich what is missing or incomplete, and publish clean records to the downstream systems that depend on them. When that workflow is systematized, product onboarding becomes a predictable, repeatable process. When it is not, every supplier upload is a manual cleanup exercise and catalog growth slows at exactly the moment demand to expand is highest. Read it here: Supplier Product Data Management: Fix Supplier Spreadsheets and Scale Product Onboarding.

Legacy PIM to AI PIM: The Evolution of Product Information Management

Product information management systems were designed to store and govern product data. They were built for a world where data was relatively static, SKU counts were manageable, and content requirements were consistent across a small number of channels. That world no longer describes B2B and industrial commerce. Today’s catalogs have incomplete supplier data as their starting point. Attributes are missing. Descriptions are generic or copied. The data is organized but not good enough to support semantic search, AI recommendation engines, or the channel requirements modern commerce demands. The gap is not a storage problem. It is an enrichment problem, and traditional PIM systems were never designed to solve it.

AI-native enrichment addresses the missing layer: ingesting incomplete inputs from supplier files and PDFs, filling attribute gaps, standardizing values at scale, and generating content structured for AI, search, and discovery. Unlike manual enrichment, which scales with headcount and introduces inconsistency, AI-driven enrichment is a continuous system: product data improves as new inputs are added, requirements change, and catalog coverage expands. The result is a catalog that does not just store what exists but continuously improves toward completeness. Read it here: Legacy PIM to AI PIM: The Evolution of Product Information Management.

The Product Data Architecture Guide for AI-Ready Retail Teams

Most B2B catalog operations do not struggle because of one large, visible problem. They struggle because hundreds of small data issues accumulate across systems and teams: attributes with inconsistent naming conventions, images stored in a dozen different folders, missing required fields, manufacturer copy pasted into descriptions without rewriting, category templates that do not match what merchandising actually needs. Each issue is manageable in isolation. Across a catalog of tens of thousands of SKUs and dozens of suppliers, they create compounding friction that blocks automation, limits search performance, and increases the manual burden on every team that depends on accurate product information.

Strong product data architecture removes that friction. It establishes how data flows between systems, what standards apply at each stage, and what rules govern enrichment, classification, and channel-specific formatting. When that structure is in place, enrichment becomes faster and more consistent, AI tools produce higher-quality outputs because the inputs are clean, and new products move from supplier intake to live faster. The foundation, once built, pays dividends across every downstream use case and makes every future catalog expansion cheaper and less error-prone. Read it here: The Product Data Architecture Guide for AI-Ready Retail Teams.

Trustana Joins as a B2BEA Premium Partner

The B2B eCommerce Association is pleased to welcome Trustana as a premium partner. This partnership reflects a shared focus on the operational challenges that determine whether B2B digital commerce programs deliver: catalog quality, enrichment at scale, and the data infrastructure that supports search, discovery, and buyer experience across complex product lines.

As a premium vendor partner, Trustana contributes practical perspectives on product data enrichment, AI-driven catalog operations, and the workflows that help manufacturers and distributors close the gap between what they sell and what they can show online. To learn more about vendor partnership at B2BEA or to explore membership options for solution providers, visit the B2BEA vendor membership page.

For practitioners and leaders looking to dig deeper, Trustana’s full directory listing is available at b2bea.org/directory/technology/trustana, and the company’s site is at trustana.com. The B2B eCommerce Association is the leading community for B2B professionals and companies focused on succeeding in digital commerce.