With tariff policies changing week by week, many retailers and brands are struggling to update pricing quickly and consistently across channels.
The modern retailer has to syndicate data across multiple e-commerce sites, in-store systems, digital ads, third-party marketplaces, and more. That process remains painfully slow for many organizations.
“Being able to be nimble is more important than ever,” said Leah Allen, CMO of Syndigo, in an interview with RetailWire. She noted that, for many brands, product data is split between e-commerce platforms, spreadsheets, and legacy systems with no centralized source of truth.
“The sentiment we hear from C-level leaders is, ‘We have all these disconnected systems, and we know we need to bring them together,’” Allen said.
This isn’t just a data infrastructure problem. It’s a customer experience problem.
When skincare brand Foreo raised prices due to tariff-driven cost increases, it took a proactive approach. “We want to be fair to our consumers. The fairest thing is to give notice,” the company told Vogue Business. Foreo informed its customers via email, social, and website banners that prices would be increasing due to the U.S. tariffs and that they should buy now before prices go up.
Brands like Lingua Franca took a similar approach, publishing an open letter that walked customers through the cost pressures behind its price changes. In both cases, the issue wasn’t just pricing strategy. It was how well internal systems and external messaging could align under pressure.
Large retailers have already been working to fix these gaps. Target is upgrading its inventory management system with AI-powered tools to improve speed and reduce stockouts. Walmart has been rolling out digital shelf labels across thousands of stores, allowing stores to update pricing on more than 120,000 items within minutes.
These are serious investments, and they show that even for the biggest players, reacting in real time is a challenge worth addressing.
Smaller and mid-sized retailers face the same issue with fewer resources. Some have leaned into automation and AI, but Info-Tech Research Group cautions that without clean, structured product data, automation just accelerates the chaos.
That’s why tariff changes aren’t just policy shifts. They’re pressure tests. They reveal which retailers have built for speed and which are still dragging pricing updates across disconnected systems.
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