Umbrella Catalog Architecture — Vetsource

About the project

Unified Product Catalog for Veterinary E-commerce at Scale

Vetsource is a leading veterinary e-commerce and home delivery platform serving thousands of veterinary practices across North America. The engagement in September 2025 addressed a core operational bottleneck: a fragmented catalog management architecture that forced product teams to maintain redundant data sets across multiple systems, driving up operational costs and slowing product availability. As PIM Architect, the mission was to redesign the catalog operating model around a single, scalable product data structure — the Umbrella Catalog — capable of serving all downstream channels from a single source of truth.

THE CHALLENGE

Fragmented Catalog Management Across Multiple Product Lines

Veterinary e-commerce has specific constraints: strict regulatory compliance for prescription products, multi-supplier SKU management, and complex brand/generic product relationships. Vetsource's catalog architecture had evolved tactically, with different product lines maintained in silos. The result was catalog maintenance overhead that consumed significant team capacity, duplicated enrichment effort, and created inconsistency risks across channels. The challenge was to consolidate without disrupting live operations — a constraint that ruled out big-bang re-platforming and required an additive, phased architecture approach.

HOW WE FIX ISSUEs

50%+ Reduction in Catalog Maintenance Through Unified Architecture

The Umbrella Catalog architecture established a single canonical product data layer shared across all product lines and downstream channels. Inheritance rules were defined to allow brand-specific or channel-specific overrides without breaking the shared core. The architecture reduced catalog maintenance workload by over 50%, eliminated data duplication across product lines, and created a foundation for future PIM platform selection. The model was designed to be platform-agnostic — applicable whether the business chose Akeneo, Salsify, or any other enterprise PIM system as its implementation layer.

THE TOOLBOX