A comprehensive solution to the problem of product content
creation, sourcing and management for retailers and their suppliers
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Digital product content is the fuel of ecommerce
When consumers choose where to buy in digital channels, many factors play a part, including price, range, fulfilment options and customer experience. One of the most important components of customer experience is the quality of product information.
If an online shopper cannot find the information they need to verify that a product meets their needs, an alternative retailer is only a click away. And with online now playing a significant role in researching in store purchases, getting digital product information up to standard is essential for total business performance.
Retailers have a dash for range expansion, especially online. With the possibility of limitless numbers of products through onsite marketplaces, helping consumers find products from the enormous choice is essential, otherwise overwhelmed shoppers will search elsewhere, or just buy on price.
But, product information management is a massive challenge for most retailers, leading to lower sales, higher costs and frustration for colleagues
Significant business impact of product content
Product content is the fuel of e-commerce. There is little point in having a Ferrari of an e-commerce platform powered by substandard product information, resulting in a lacklustre performance.
Good product content drives performance through numerous retail metrics across all channels:
- Higher margin – from consumers being confident in buying higher value products
- Lower return rates – from consumers getting their purchase right first time
- Lower customer service cost – from a reduced need to answer customer questions
- Higher basket size – with the ability to cross sell product using digital merchandising tools
- Lower marketing costs – as conversion rates increase and your site becomes the default destination for authoritative information
The impact of product information is so fundamental, that engaging and highly informative product content is now a basic requirement in order to compete in retail. But achieving this is not easy, and many retailers are still yet to accept this new cost of doing business.
SKUvantage was founded by former retailers to solve the problem of product content, using decades of real world experience
The challenge that all retailers face
Creating, managing and publishing this product content is an enormous challenge for retailers; a people, process and technology challenge for which few retailers are equipped.
Product content management is the least glamorous job within an e-commerce team, with few volunteers to execute the daily drudgery of tasks. With a limited team and continuous churn of range, many retailers end up in spreadsheet chaos and with images poorly managed on shared drives.
Systems that attempt to manage the chaos are often complex and single-point sensitive on experts. It can be a recipe for underperformance for even the largest retailer. Often products lie orphaned in warehouses never to even make it online and meet their willing consumer.
To mitigate these challenges and costs, many retailers attempt to demand product images and data from their suppliers. However suppliers are equally unequipped to meet the diversity of requests for product content in a myriad of formats from their retailer customers. This often means that only the bigger retailers get cut through, giving them yet another competitive advantage.
It is little wonder that in Australia many websites have very poor product information and a compromised customer experience and frustrated colleagues. A retailer’s e-commerce and multichannel ambitions are often directly limited by their ability to source quality product content at scale.
The three components of our solution work together seamlessly to deliver efficient sourcing, creation and management of product content
SKUlibrary is an incredibly easy to use product information management platform. Our clients use it to manage their product content and syndicate it to their customers and their own systems and ecommerce platforms. We also use SKUlibrary in our business to manage product content production for our clients, so we are incentivised to make it as efficient as possible. So SKUlibrary includes many unique and innovative features specifically designed to make product content management much easier.
SKUlibrary is fully configurable to our clients’ requirements, including data models, workflow and user permissions, and typically takes just a few days to set up. As a cloud based solution, SKUlibrary also removes the dependency on internal systems management experts and costly internal infrastructure costs for an enterprise PIM. Don’t take our word for it, ask for a demo…
SKUcapture is our managed service to support retailers in acquiring product content from their suppliers, and can also be used as a product nomination tool. This makes the suppliers’ lives easier, by avoiding filling in spreadsheets, and the retailers’ lives easier from not having to chase the suppliers. We do this by building a bespoke solution for the retailer which includes training guides, validation rules and in-page help. We also isolate a retailer’s product content, so it isn’t shared with other retailers.
As a massive bonus, we have hundreds of brands as clients, and they get immediate notification of requests from the retailers we work with. Suppliers have varying capability so our very helpful team give them support where they need it and chase them if they don’t do as requested. And if either the suppliers or retailers need product content creating, then they can always turn to SKUvantage production services, funded by the supplier or the retailer.
SKUstudio is your complete product content production solution. We previously had 10 photography set ups across two studios, but since recently closing our studios we have transitioned to exclusively providing high-quality product renders.
All clients are different and we customise the solution for the client requirement. Product renders are the modern solution for product content as it means updating your product labels becomes much more efficient whenever changes are needed. Our renders cover a wide range of needs, including render overlay, renders from artwork, 3D renders and modelling, x-ray renders and 360 spin renders.
As former online retailers, we intimately understand the challenges of product content and how to solve it
SKUvantage was founded by former online retailers who intimately understood this challenge. The unique SKUvantage ecosystem of services and technology, supports the creation, management, syndication and publishing of product content and is used by hundreds of retailers and brands.
The SKUvantage solution suite is explicitly designed to solve the problem of how to deliver good product content to consumers and deals comprehensively with the challenge:
- Product content creation: rendering products, from 1 to 100,000
- Feeding FREE product content from suppliers: many brands use SKUvantage to get their product content to retailers
- Efficient sourcing of product content: managing a process for suppliers to easily deliver product content to a retailer’s requirements
- Easy-to-use product information management platform: meaning you don’t need experts to manage product information technology
- Direct syndication of our brand clients’ content: this highly innovate technology delivers product data onto your PIM product page
- Product nomination and induction technology: to support range expansion whilst maintaining product quality, without the cost
- Rich product content injection: overcoming technical constraints to deliver full and engaging product content directly to your product page with little effort
Numerous retailers, including many of Australia’s largest chains, use SKUvantage services and technology to deliver better product content to their customers with less effort on their teams and suppliers. They use this SKUvantage expertise across these capabilities to give them a competitive advantage.
SNAPSHOT CASE STUDIES
These short case studies illustrate how our solution works to solve product content problems for our clients
Improving digital B2B is the next ecommerce frontier and Sydney Trains ambitions illustrate the opportunity. Sydney trains provides components to support the maintenance of rail infrastructure across Australia, across a wide diversity of electrical and mechanical parts.
To provide their customers and engineers the correct information in an online catalogue, Sydney Trains required images of components to populate this platform and selected SKUvantage to capture these images. For operational reasons, Sydney Trains preferred the shoot to occur on site and was required at short notice due to the threat of the corona virus.
SKUvantage’s team of photographers set up in the warehouse and we picked, shot and measured products to the Sydney Trains style guide. The images were loaded into SKUlibrary for client review, and ultimately delivered to their naming convention and requirement, ahead of schedule, safely and on budget.
To help manage its product catalogue and get products online rapidly, Oroton uses SKUlibrary as its product information management platform. SKUlibrary is used to enrich product data such as price, merchandising attributes, descriptions and images. SKUlibrary is also available as an online catalogue for all Oroton colleagues to easily access product information they need to support a customer’s multichannel shopping experience.
SKUvantage also shoots handbags and other accessories for Oroton. This has the additional benefit that the products that are shot by SKUvantage for Oroton are loaded directly into SKUlibrary by our colleagues for publishing into the Oroton BigCommerce platform via a direct integration. This ultimately means a quicker turnaround by the Oroton team resulting in more time on the digital shelf, and more sales, for less effort.
As part of its multichannel strategy, Mitre 10 engaged SKUvantage to source product content from the diversity of its suppliers. Using our SKUcapture service, we sourced thousands of products images and data from hundreds of suppliers with minimal effort for Mitre 10. By using SKUlibrary as a vendor portal this gave suppliers a low effort method of providing Mitre 10 the content they required .
After it had been enhanced and verified in SKUlibrary, which was used by Mitre 10 as their online PIM, this was then fed into Mitre10’s Magento e-commerce platform. This end-to-end solution saved Mitre 10’s team a huge amount of time and avoided the distraction of sourcing product content whilst launching their online capability.
An investment in product content is highly compelling. It is the 1% of your marketing budget to drive the performance of the other 99%
A compelling investment
In Australia, product information is rarely done well, presenting both an opportunity for those that wish to exploit this as a point of difference. Yet an investment in product content pays for itself very rapidly in a diversity of visible and intangible ways.
It is important to recognise that the sourcing, creation and management of engaging product content is a cost of doing business which should be baked into budgets. It is a small proportion of the overall marketing spend that drives the performance of the overall marketing investment.
To maximise the return on this investment, the SKUvantage solution provides a proven, cost-effective and rapid approach to the challenge with the least amount of effort, giving your business the fuel for the e-commerce engine. So power up your digital product content strategy and accelerate your business growth.