In the world of e-commerce, we often get used to tools that seem to help us work, but upon closer inspection turn out to be crutches for imperfect processes. Task trackers are a perfect example. They emerged because content workflows in online stores have always been chaotic—and chaos needed to be somehow documented and organized.
Think about any online store, especially one that works with multiple suppliers: every day, dozens or even hundreds of product listings pass through the hands of content managers. Add a new product, check its specifications, upload images, write descriptions, assign categories, verify stock, adjust the price. On the surface, it seems simple. In practice, it’s a long chain of approvals, checks, and edits.
To keep this from falling apart, stores have been adopting trackers for years. Trello, Asana, Jira, Bitrix24—it doesn’t matter which—the principle is always the same: create a task card, assign it to someone, set a deadline, wait, review, send back for revisions. And repeat for every single product.
The Illusion of Control
The biggest trap here is that a tracker creates the illusion of control. It feels like everything is under supervision because each task has a status and an owner. But the process doesn’t actually become faster or simpler. In fact, e-commerce content processing often happens in waves: today a supplier sends 200 products, tomorrow 50, next week 1,000. Suddenly your board is overflowing with cards, and it’s physically impossible to process them all quickly.
What do stores do? They start slicing the workload: priority to high-ticket items or bestsellers, and everything else is left “hanging.” As a result, part of the assortment goes live late—or never. This means you’re already losing to competitors at the product range level, even though “on paper” everything seems under control.
A Real-World Example: When a Tracker Slows You Down
In one major electronics store, the task tracker looked like a battlefield. One column for “New Products,” another for “In Progress,” another for “Review,” and one for “Ready to Publish.” Sounds neat, but inside were cards for products the supplier had sent over two months ago.
Why? Because while the task made its way through the entire chain, prices, stock levels, and even photos changed. The team had to start over. The tracker wasn’t to blame—it was simply a mirror reflecting how outdated the process itself had become.
When You Don’t Need a Tracker Anymore
Now imagine you don’t have this chain of manual actions at all. The supplier sends a feed—your system automatically receives it, processes it, normalizes the data, adds images, assigns categories, checks for duplicates, and outputs a ready-to-use product listing that already meets your store’s standards.
This isn’t a fantasy—it’s exactly what NotPIM.com does. We remove the very reason content teams need trackers. You don’t have a task called “Create product card”—because it’s already created. No “Verify stock” task—because stock levels are always current. No “Replace image” task—because photos are automatically validated and uploaded correctly.
Instead of dozens of small, urgent tasks cluttering your tracker, you have one major integration running on its own.
A New Role for the Content Department
When routine processing is automated, the content department stops being a “product card assembly line.” It becomes a strategic hub focused on expanding the assortment, strengthening specific categories, and improving the on-site UX. People stop being “cogs” in the mechanism and start being the brains steering the store’s growth.
And here’s the key difference: without a tracker, your work doesn’t get harder. On the contrary—the extra layer of bureaucracy disappears, and the team’s attention shifts to what actually drives sales.
But There Are Other Processes
Yes—marketing, logistics, pricing—these are separate major areas where trackers and PIM systems can still be useful. We’re not saying trackers as a whole are obsolete. But when it comes to product content, trackers have only ever addressed the symptoms, not the root cause of the problem. NotPIM.com eliminates the problem itself.
And this is one of those cases where you can honestly say: “The content department, as it used to exist, is no longer needed.” With the right integration in place, a store won’t need to keep an army of content managers and tracker administrators just to “keep the storefront up to date.”