When consumers choose where to buy in digital channels, many factors play a part, including price, range, fulfilment options, range 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. 

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 lackluster performance.

Good product content drives performance through numerous retail metrics across all channels:

• Higher margin – from consumers being confident in the benefits of 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.

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. 

A holistic solution 

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: photographing & transcribing 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
• 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 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.

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.

To learn more about how SKUvantage can support your ecommerce objectives with better product content, click here.