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Achieving accurate product data through syndication in the retail world

January 26, 2024

In retail, boosting revenue requires a sustained strategic effort across product aspects, marketing, operations, and customer service. Improving product visibility is key for engagement and revenue growth. A dynamic product content and data syndication strategy is crucial, with traditional methods giving way to automation for increased demand and omnichannel expansion.

Overview of Product Content Syndication

What is PCS

Product Content Syndication (PCS) is the process of distributing standardized product data across diverse customer channels, marketplaces, and merchants, ensuring consistency and adherence to enterprise rules and quality standards. Such marketplaces may include, Amazon, Best Buy or Facebook Marketplace.

PCS Implications in Retail

In the dynamic retail industry, success in digital commerce hinges on accurately publishing and synchronizing product content with sell-side partners. Managing the vast volume of content manually is challenging, making a robust PCS mechanism valuable for retailers in preparing channel-ready content efficiently at scale.

Why Syndicate your Product Data?

Accelerating Trade vs. Channel Velocity

Daily launches of new products and channels require continuous availability across trades. Innovations in customer-facing channels reshape industries. The digital revolution connects products and services to the cloud, transforming industry trade. Revenue now comes from digital products and services, expanding options for businesses across various channels.

The New Shape of Business

In the coming decade, digital technologies will transform industries by extending products and services. Enterprises must develop digital extensions to reach new markets, adopt resilient business models, and prepare for growth. Striking the right balance between traditional and digital business is crucial. Today, organizations need a robust product presence across channels to survive in the market.

Changing Consumer Behavior

In contrast to the old era of administrative IT efficiency, there is no universal blueprint for today's consumers. Organizations strive to exceed customer expectations by providing accurate product information across all channels. Differentiation is crucial to avoid negative impacts on brand value and revenue. To boost sales across multiple channels, adopting the customer's perspective is essential.

It's crucial to adopt an end-to-end solution for seamless automation, allowing quick updates from the PIM platform to retail locations and partners in required formats.

Manual vs. Automated Syndication

Manual product data syndication is costly, time-consuming, error-prone, and challenging to scale. Retailers, focused on cost optimization, are shifting towards automation for the syndication process. Automated methods capture customer attention across markets, using templates, analysis tools, and APIs. It's crucial to adopt an end-to-end solution for seamless automation, allowing quick updates from the PIM platform to retail locations and partners in required formats.

How Product Content Syndication Increases Revenue

Accelerate your Time-To-Market

Automated product content syndication streamlines the handling of unique channel requirements, eliminating errors and generating bulk catalogs formatted for each channel, ensuring timely and accurate market entry for your products.

Save Costly Resources

An efficient process reduces overhead by swiftly and reliably syndicating product data and rich content across multiple sales and marketing channels, enabling faster team productivity and resource savings.

Build Trust & Loyalty

Ensure accurate, detailed, and customized product information across all touchpoints, allowing seamless transactions for customers across channels without delays or inconvenience.

Scale Your Business

In the ever-changing retail landscape, adopting technology-driven strategies is essential for personalized customer experiences. A robust product data syndication strategy ensures agility in adapting to new channels, technologies, and consumer behaviours.

Enhance Business Agility

In an uncertain future, retailers can proactively adapt to different market scenarios through agile Product Data Syndication (PDS) strategies. This approach enables them to connect with customers seeking conversational interactions across channels, creating new opportunities.

We've outlined that any company with multiple SKUs would greatly benefit from PCS. The day-to-day tasks of manual syndication are longer required to keep product information up-to-date and synced across any unique array of marketing channels. As we look into the future of product content syndication, we already feel very comfortable with the tools at hand to perform the daunting tasks of keeping product data accurate and trustworthy.

This article is a summary of Pimcore's PIM & Product Content Syndication for Retail whitepaper. We have pull out key points for you to easily digest.