How Spaenaur Built a Digital-Ready Product Catalog with Akeneo and Shopify
Case Study Overview
The Challenge: Transitioning from a Catalog-Centric Legacy System to a Scalable eCommerce
Spaenaur is a trusted Canadian distributor of industrial fasteners, hardware components, and tools, serving B2B and MRO customers across North America. Known for their responsiveness and deep inventory, Spaenaur specializes in both standard and hard-to-find parts.
Founded in 1936, the company has built a lasting reputation on speed, technical knowledge, and reliable fulfillment. With over 50,000 products, Spaenaur remains a go-to resource for professionals who need precision and performance.
For decades, Spaenaur’s iconic 1,700-page printed catalog was the primary channel for product discovery. But as customer expectations shifted online, the company’s legacy ERP system couldn’t support the rich, flexible product data needed for online selling.
While the catalog model served its purpose, it limited Spaenaur’s ability to scale, adapt to seasonal offerings, or quickly introduce new product lines. Product updates were constrained by static PDFs and manual workflows, slowing their go-to-market speed and reducing agility.
Even when products were ready, getting them into digital channels was a resource-heavy process, often requiring costly development work and significant IT involvement. Internally, product data lived with the IT and product teams, with minimal input from marketing. As a result, attributes and descriptions were often written from a technical lens, rather than optimized for customer experience. This created disconnects between what customers were searching for and how products were presented online.
Their initial move to eCommerce via Magento proved too complex and resource-heavy for their lean internal team. Development was costly, updates were difficult, and customizing the user experience required deep technical skills. Without a more user-friendly and integrated solution, even getting product data into their digital storefront demanded significant manual effort or third-party support.
Spaenaur needed a system that could centralize product data, empower non-technical users, and scale efficiently across new channels without compromising speed or accuracy. Shifting to a digital-first model meant finding a platform that could support seamless integration and future-ready commerce experiences.
“The first thing that we thought of Akeneo was for it to become one source of truth for our product data. We wanted it to house a lot of data that wouldn’t fit in the ERP that we would need to use to build an eCommerce store — one that would offer all the right specifications and attributes that a customer was looking for.”
The Solution: Transforming Product Data for a Smarter Shopify Experience
Spaenaur implemented Akeneo Product Cloud to centralize and streamline product information management, laying the groundwork for a seamless transition from their legacy catalog-based model to a modern eCommerce experience.
Their goal was to unify product data across teams, reduce reliance on legacy ERP limitations, and enable their small team to scale product content delivery without overburdening technical resources.
Akeneo became the company’s single source of truth for more than 50,000 SKUs, housing critical product details that couldn’t be supported in the ERP and giving the marketing team ownership over product storytelling. With Akeneo, Spaenaur could enrich product data with customer-centric language, standardized attributes, and titles designed to boost online discoverability—something that wasn’t possible when IT owned the data exclusively.
Integrating Akeneo with the Shopify app played a pivotal role in bringing Spaenaur’s extensive catalog to life online. By switching to Shopify and leveraging Akeneo’s native connector, Spaenaur was able to sync clean, enriched product data directly into their storefront without involving multiple external agencies or complex custom coding.
With the app’s flexible sync scheduling, updates made in Akeneo automatically flow into Shopify, ensuring that listings are always accurate and current – no manual re-entry needed!
The integration also supports a pilot program where long-time Spaenaur customers test new features before public rollout, offering valuable feedback and ensuring the new experience matches the company’s reputation for reliability and speed.
Spaenaur also built custom workflows in Akeneo using AI capabilities to flag discrepancies between attributes and titles, ensuring higher data accuracy at scale without relying on manual checks across tens of thousands of SKUs. By combining automation with human validation, the team reduced errors, improved efficiency, and freed up time to focus on strategic growth initiatives.
The Result: Faster Data Updates and a Smoother Path to Digital Commerce
With Akeneo PIM and the Shopify App, Spaenaur is laying the foundation for a modern digital commerce strategy, one that doesn’t require a large dev team or complex workflows. Managing product data is now significantly more efficient. Once time-consuming updates that relied on rigid ERP limitations are now handled directly within Akeneo by a small internal team.
The Shopify App streamlined integration, allowing Spaenaur to easily sync enriched data from Akeneo into their new eCommerce site. Instead of overhauling data across multiple systems or depending on external agencies, the marketing team now takes ownership of product information, ensuring titles, specs, and attributes are optimized for digital discovery.
AI-powered title validation within Akeneo helps flag discrepancies and clean up legacy data, further improving product accuracy and saving countless hours of manual review. As Spaenaur continues to digitize their catalog and onboard more products, this scalable model supports faster product launches and better customer experiences, which result in long-term growth.
While Spaenaur is currently focused on perfecting their new Shopify experience, the team sees significant future potential in expanding to additional platforms and marketplaces such as Amazon and Google. With Akeneo as their central product data hub, they’ve laid the groundwork for scalable growth—confident that when the time is right, their PIM infrastructure will support a smooth transition into omnichannel commerce.
Case Study Snapshot
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