Building an online store can take days or weeks. Building a good catalogue can take months.

That is one of the most underestimated steps when a shop goes online — and a core reason an online store alone is not enough for small Arab groceries in the Netherlands.

With a small range, the job looks simple: a photo, a name, a price and a short description. As the catalogue grows, every detail multiplies.

One product may have different sizes, weights, packs, flavours or near-identical brand names. For food, those details matter. Customers want the right pack size, brand and sometimes origin or ingredients.

The work multiplies with every product

If entering one product takes only a few minutes, hundreds of products become tens or hundreds of hours. Then comes maintenance: items go out of stock, prices change, photos update, packs change, and a new size appears for the same product.

A catalogue is not a project that ends. It is an ongoing process.

Photos are part of the problem

Good product photography takes time. Even when a supplier provides images, they are not always consistent, high quality or matching the pack you actually sell. Shop owners often face hundreds of images to collect, crop, name and upload.

Translation adds another layer

If you serve Arabic-, Dutch- and English-speaking customers, the same product must be clear in more than one language. Machine translation alone is often not enough for traditional food names. Catalogue work becomes specialised work.

That is why a shared, maintained catalogue is valuable: shops reuse a structured base instead of rebuilding the same data from scratch. On MnBaladna, merchants manage products through the Store app and can see a full grocery layout in the Makhzan demo. Related reading: local market knowledge and shared infrastructure for small stores.

This catalogue problem is part of a wider challenge local shops face when they move into digital sales. We map that full picture in our guide on the challenges of e-commerce for small Arab shops in the Netherlands. Catalogue work also drives hidden running costs.

Helpful guides

• Why an online store alone is not enough for small Arab shops
• How shared infrastructure helps small stores sell online
• What the Makhzan demo store shows
• Start as a seller