Why is PIM the first choice for brands looking to sell successfully on marketplaces?

 An online marketplace is a digital platform where information regarding a product or service is exchanged between multiple parties. The objective is to streamline the processes of product discovery, evaluation, prospecting, and purchase in a lean business model.


But given the available opportunities in marketplaces today, it is interesting to note how many vendors and products are showcased on the customers screen. For instance, Facebook Marketplace was being used by 800 million people in 70 different countries every month in 2018 while Amazon encases close to 9.6 million sellers who acquired 54 percent of paid units in the third quarter of 2020.

In such a multi-vendor ecosystem, ensuring that your product has a high success rate of getting noticed amongst thousands of variants depends on–

  1. Creating a unique offer and displaying it strategically
  2. Adhering to marketplace standards
  3. Being responsive and always keeping catalogs and ads up to date
  4. Expanding to new geographies with iterative experiments while practicing customer “emotionomics”

Across all these four mantras of marketplace success, one thing remains consistently critical – product information. It is required to showcase product features and benefits, and also display offers and promotions. It decides whether standard requirements are met. It even plays an important role in catalog management and communicating brand values.

It all comes down to giving your shoppers the best data!

Product data is crucial across all sales channels, but marketplaces top the list of platforms that need special attention to product description. Consider a product page on a marketplace website. It primarily comprises of details about the product, prices, discounts, feature specifications, technical specifications (if any), customer reviews, and related items. Now, if an important attribute  either goes missing from this page, is inconsistent with information displayed on other pages, or is simply incomplete, what would customers do apart from clicking goodbye and scooting to some other marketplace?

Product data not only helps customers in making informed decisions but also increases the chances of searchability in a marketplace. When you offer detailed product descriptions that include important information, they’re more likely to show up at the top of search filter results. Interestingly, almost all marketplaces have user guides that dictate product data feed compliance. Product data is undeniably a force of action for marketplace sales and yet brands face challenges like heterogeneous data formats that obstruct entry into the ecosystem, data duplication between variants, and entanglement between multiple source files. As more and more enterprises make a move towards selling on marketplaces, it’s increasingly important to develop tools and competencies to govern third-party seller product data.

Why PIM’s the best fit?

While it is obvious that product data was not designed specifically for marketplaces, nor were traditional Product Information Management (PIM) systems, PIM has nevertheless become the most effective way of marketplace catalog management. PIM allows brands to standardize their product data formats to comply with regulations and enable quick syndication and onboarding. 

It presents you with comprehensive, accurate, and consumable data, thereby enabling the correct mapping and categorization of all product data. Even if you have your own brand website with different formats and structures, PIM empowers you to export product data files into any marketplace effortlessly. With its easy-to-use cross-functionalities, you can even combine or split product data to create new attributes.

Having clearly structured, labeled, and formatted product data, helps you flourish and thrive in the cut-throat competition of marketplaces –

  1. Your product catalogs are enhanced with persuasive, SEO-friendly product descriptions that highlight unique value propositions
  2. Your product information, including media files, is tailored to the context of each marketplace, be it Amazon, eBay, Rakuten, or any other platform
  3. Your listings are enriched with unique product features and benefits to inform and entice shoppers
  4. Your order management is supported with automated data recovery and streamlined workflows that govern internal processes
  5. Your product categorization is accurate, and taxonomies are based on the product specifications and customers purchase behavior
  6. Your product data has high-quality standards through proper attribute extraction and standardization across digital platforms

There’s more.

With PIM, you can boost your company’s credibility with structured information centralized on a single system with zero chances of inconsistency or inaccuracy that can be disseminated across various marketplaces. This way, you have a single place to store product prices, images, SKUs, etc., and you can easily upload this information to various marketplace platforms with minimal effort. When implemented at full potential and scale, PIM can also support strategic vendor management and advertising in marketplaces for a better product experience, lower returns, and increased traffic and conversion.

Marketplaces streamline product data management!

Marketplaces are rapidly dominating the world of eCommerce accounting for almost 57 percent of global web sales (back in 2019). While the reasons for their popularity range from easy expansion of customer bases to cost-effective trials of new products, data plays a ubiquitously potent role in all of them. On one hand, product data management can drive customer acquisition, increase sales, and increase customer lifetime value (CLV). 

On the other, if not maintained properly, product data can tarnish your reputation, hamper growth, and lead to customer loss. So, having a robust Product information management (PIM) solution with the power of clean, singular, and authoritative product data and analytics is a non-negotiable investment when it comes to succeeding in marketplaces.

Authored by : Rakesh Kumar, CSO, Pimcore Global Services, a Happiest Minds Company.

Comments

  1. SOS BoosterOctober 7, 2021 at 4:22 AM

    Hire Digital employee engagement platform to help you plan, host and execute your employee engagement activities. 100+ Companies Trust SOS. Best Platform to connect, recognize & reward employees.

    ReplyDelete

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

What Impact Can a Product Information Management System Have?

Image
 Product marketers today are striving continuously to strike a balance between maintaining relevancy when entering new markets while stepping-up resiliency to increase profit potential. To address the ever-increasing customer demands across multiple touchpoints, they need a central hub to manage product information like attributes, and specifications. That is because they need real-time visibility into product data and rule out discrepancies by demolishing multiple data silos, so that Customer Experience (CX) does not suffer. This is where a Product Information Management (PIM) solution comes in. It collects and combines product information from multiple sources and enables marketers to optimize product data synchronization and publishing. PIM helps in: controlling information at each stage of a product's lifecycle; improvement in data quality and accuracy; and simplification of product catalogue management. This allows product marketing managers to facilitate omnichannel marketing...
Read more

Why Master Data Management Lies at the Heart of Supply Chain?

Image
A sound MDM solution can help supply-chain managers to achieve data completeness, consistency, coherence and compatibility. Supply chain organizations need to be responsible for master data about customers, products, locations, vendors, and suppliers. With data quality and consistency becoming critical in supply chain performance, supply chain leaders must pay more attention to MDM. Sales volumes are increasing, distribution networks are developing, and supply chain professionals are trying their best to cope up with evolving business imperatives. A sound MDM solution can help supply-chain managers to achieve data completeness, consistency, coherence and compatibility. Supply chain organizations need to be responsible for master data about customers, products, locations, vendors, and suppliers. Effective master data management platform around data accountability and ownership must be clearly defined and leveraged by supply chain leadership. But why’s the focus on supply...
Read more

Are You Looking for a perfect PIM? Check for these five features!

Image
  To meet customers’ expectations, achieve high growth, and fulfill revenue goals, enterprises need a perfect Product Information Management (PIM) system that centralizes, integrates, and delivers data seamlessly. Today’s customers are an evolved lot, who make informed decisions about every single purchase. This means that businesses need to provide them intrinsic details about the products they sell. Given that the average buyer’s attention span is 8 seconds, customers not only appreciate being served with the right information but also at the right place and at the right time. Ultimately, offering all product-related information to customers in an easy-to-digest format is all that matters. This is where investing in a robust product information management (PIM) system becomes imperative. A PIM solution helps in data management and modeling, thus organizing an enterprise’s product information database. By enforcing semantics and enabling integration, PIM acts as a single pane of ...
Read more