A quarterly catalog hygiene checklist

Catalog data degrades quietly. No single import or edit breaks anything visible; the damage is cumulative, and it surfaces as a collection that is missing products, a feed that rejects half your range, or a margin report nobody trusts.

The checklist

1. Empty SEO titles — filter on “SEO title is empty” and fill per category.
2. Empty SEO descriptions — same filter, same approach.
3. Missing cost per item — every empty cost is a wrong margin report.
4. Orphaned compare-at prices — filter on “compare-at is not empty” outside a promotion; these are leftovers making your catalog look permanently discounted.
5. Duplicate vendor spellings — filter by vendor contains, and merge.
6. Stale tags — last season’s markers still driving automated collections.
7. Untracked inventory — variants that can oversell indefinitely.
8. Missing barcodes — the reason feeds reject products.
9. Products at zero stock for a season — draft or archive them.

Do it in the same order every quarter

The value is in the repetition. Running the same nine filters each quarter turns hygiene into a measurable thing — the counts should fall — instead of a vague intention to tidy up.

Fix the source, not just the symptom

If empty SEO fields keep reappearing, the product creation process is the problem. If vendor spellings keep splitting, the import mapping is. Cleaning is necessary; finding out why it got dirty is what makes the next quarter shorter.

Keep the receipts

Task history keeps 30 to 90 days depending on plan. A hygiene pass leaves a log of exactly what was changed, which is useful the first time somebody asks why a product’s vendor is different.

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