March 2026 Product Release: Simplifying the Path From Product Data to Digital Shelf grade

This month's release is all about removing the friction between your product data and the places it needs to be. Whether that's reaching major retailers, enriching content with AI, or keeping your workflows running smoothly, these updates help you move faster with more confidence.

In this release, we're giving you the power to:

• Syndicate to Wayfair, Home Depot, Walmart, and Perigold through new direct API integrations, with built-in validation that catches issues before they cause rejections.
• Give your AI richer context by using PDFs alongside text and images as source material for Inspire content generation - producing more accurate, more compliant product content at scale.
• Automate complex product information workflows without custom code with visibility and tracking enhancements to Workflows 

Here’s the detail on everything that’s new for your business this month:

Go Live on Major Retail Channels Even Faster — With Fewer Rejections

Syndicate Advance now includes direct API integrations with Wayfair, Home Depot, Walmart, and Perigold, making it even easier to get your product content onto some of North America's largest retail and B2B platforms.

These new connections support first-party (1P) syndication, replacing the manual effort of preparing and distributing flat files. Instead, product data flows directly from your PIM to each retailer's API in the format they require — automatically, and at scale. Submission status tracking and built-in validation feedback help you catch issues early, so you spend less time troubleshooting rejections and more time selling.

Test Before You Publish with Validation Mode

Alongside the new integrations, we've introduced Validation Mode — available across all supported API channels.

Even when product data passes initial validation checks, retailers often apply additional rules on their end that can cause submissions to fail. Validation Mode lets you send your data to the retailer's API for a dry run: you get the retailer's own feedback without making anything live. You can review any issues, correct them in your PIM, and publish with confidence when you're ready.

All feedback is surfaced in a new errors and feedback table within the Syndicate Advance UI, giving you a clear, SKU-level view of exactly what needs attention. The result is fewer failed submissions, faster issue resolution, and a smoother path from PIM to shelf.

The screenshots below show how Validation Mode is activated, and how the feedback is displayed: 

Give Your AI the Full Picture: Inspire Now Uses Documents as Input

AI-generated content is only as good as the context behind it. As AI-powered search reshapes how buyers discover and evaluate products, the bar for rich, accurate product content has never been higher.

Inriver Inspire now supports adding documents as source material for AI content generation, in addition to images and text. Supported formats include PDF, DOCX, XLSX, PPTX, TXT, and CSV. Technical specifications, compliance files, installation guides, and other authoritative documentation can now feed directly into the generation process. There’s no need to manually extract and re-key the information they contain. If they’re in your PIM, Inspire can use them as context. 

This means your AI has access to the full richness of your product knowledge, in whatever format it lives in. The result is generated content that's more accurate, more compliant, and better suited to the demands of global audiences and channel-specific requirements. And because Inspire handles content creation, adaptation, and translation, what once took hours of manual effort now happens in a fraction of the time, at scale.

Whether you're optimizing for SEO, AEO, or AI-assisted buyer journeys, richer inputs mean more effective outputs and a faster path to high-quality product content across every channel.

If you've licensed Inspire and you'd like to activate this  new feature in your PIM, please speak to your Customer Success Manager. 

See More, Fix Faster, Automate Without Code — Workflows Gets Smarter

Bottlenecks in product information workflows carry real revenue consequences. This release brings a set of enhancements to Inriver’s Workflow capabilities that give teams the visibility to spot problems early, the context to resolve them quickly, and the automation to prevent them in the first place.

Workflow Insights: Swiftly Diagnose and Fix Bottlenecks 

New in-progress and history views give teams clear, real-time visibility into task status across every stage of a workflow. You can monitor progress by product, see exactly where entities are sitting, and identify bottlenecks before they cause delays. Numbered badges show how many entities are sitting at each step of the workflow, highlighting congestion at a glance. 

On the history side, a new chart-based view visualizes completed workflows with lead and cycle time data, so you can analyze performance trends, see where time is being spent, and continuously refine your processes. The ability to swiftly diagnose and fix issues early — when it costs less time and money — shifts product operations from reactive troubleshooting to proactive orchestration, preventing launch delays and protecting revenues.

Entity Workflow Viewer: See Where Any Product Stands

A new read-only workflow viewer lets any user open a workflow directly from a product or entity and immediately see which step it's in — without risk of accidental edits and without needing workflow admin permissions. After updating entity details, you can reload the viewer to confirm the workflow has progressed as expected. This makes it significantly easier to validate workflow behavior, test how products move through switch paths, and answer the question "where is my product right now?" 

Entity Automation: Powerful Logic, No Custom Code

Entity Automation is a major step forward for workflow-driven product operations. It lets you build automated checks and updates directly into your workflows — such as validating that required product data is complete or automatically populating fields when certain conditions are met. And it’s all done through Inriver’s visual workflow designer. Logic that previously required custom C# extensions can now be set up in minutes, eliminating development costs, friction, and delays.

The possibilities are broad but are particularly powerful when you combine this automation with Inspire’s AI enrichment. For example, a workflow can now automatically set a review flag after AI-generated content is created, so governance workflows kick in seamlessly.

For Inriver’s implementation partners, Entity Automation opens new ways to deliver value in solution design and implementation projects without writing custom extensions, reducing project complexity and increasing the sophistication of what's possible out of the box.

Inriver Spring Release 2026

As Inriver customers and partners, you're always the first to hear about our new features. See how we're promoting the developments from this month as part of our wider Spring Release news announcement and release notes.