Buyers need rich product content to make buying decisions. Filling a site with rich content can be daunting to distributors who need to clean, standardize and enrich tens or hundreds of thousands of products from hundreds of manufacturers. Doing this product data work by hand is too slow and expensive to keep up with digital leaders. However, there is a way to automate this data work, producing rich product content at scale.
Rich Sites Have It All
By 2025, four out of five sales transactions between buyers and suppliers will occur digitally. This means that if you aren’t a digital leader in your industry, you will probably lose market share to those who are.
Best-in-class ecommerce giants such as Grainger and Amazon have very rich sites in terms of product content. Not only do they offer a nearly “endless aisle” selection, but they have lots of content for any given product. They and other digital leaders are creating higher expectations around ecommerce catalogs’ breadth, depth and insights. Meeting this expectation requires distributors to manage product content more effectively than ever.
eCommerce product content includes product descriptions, attributes data, photos and videos, cross-references, pricing, documentation and anything else customers might want to know before and after they buy. The distinction between rich or poor product content is about how much of this data and media you have online and how reliable it is.
Rich product data is integral to showcasing your company’s expansive product offerings online. The benefits of rich product content are twofold. It fulfills all a customer’s informational needs, from search through purchase and beyond. As such, rich content drives strong conversion. And insofar as you provide rich online content across your entire portfolio, it positions your company as a reliable one-stop shop for customers’ supplier needs.
When a customer can easily browse your entire product catalog and obtain details about each item, they can make informed purchasing decisions on the spot. Conversely, if they don’t find what they are looking for, whether it’s the product or associated information, they either need to call or will buy elsewhere.
Why is Vendor Product Data So Challenging?
After trying for years, most companies realize that getting their entire catalog and associated content onto their site is impossible with manual approaches. Why is it so hard to scale up manual product data work?
- Number of suppliers: With hundreds or thousands of suppliers, the inbound flow of vendor content is never-ending.
- Large product portfolios: Most distributors have broadened their catalogs over the last decade. Even small businesses may have tens of thousands of items across numerous categories. The effort and knowledge required to review and structure content for such large portfolios have increased exponentially.
- Structural and semantic inconsistency: The format and syntax of product content vary by vendor and even by product category. Before you can use this information in your systems and processes, it all must be standardized and mapped.
- Bandwidth and subject matter expertise required: Product data work often requires numerous employees across multiple departments who know the domain and the requirements of downstream systems (e.g., ecommerce or product information management). So while the scale of the work grows and grows, the bandwidth your team has to do it may have shrunk.
As a result of these challenges, and despite countless hours of wrestling with spreadsheets, most distributor sites have poor content relative to what customers expect.
Product Content is a Terrible Thing to Waste
One high-level metric for online content breadth is how many products you have in your online catalog compared to how many items you can sell from your existing offline order management process. Many distributors have only a fraction of their total portfolio online — 20% to 30% is the range we often hear.
If a company can sell a product offline, why can’t they load the required data into their online catalog? More often than not, the company has all of the product information it needs from suppliers. What is lacking is the capacity to restructure, enrich and QA all the data. This lack of capacity is what keeps online coverage so low. It also means that many products that make it onto the site have poor product attributes and media content.
For example, distributor X receives on average 40 pieces of data for 1 million SKUs from a thousand different suppliers. This equates to 40 million pieces of product content across hundreds of formats. To manually vet, standardize, match and restructure that much data could take dozens of people years to complete.
In this example, it’s easy to imagine many online items having only the minimum required information loaded. Worse, many SKUs and suppliers never make it onto the site or the PIM that feeds it. Valuable product content is wasted because there’s not enough capacity to prepare it.
Poor Sites May Actually Cost More
Can you afford not to offer rich product data to your customers? Let’s look at some of the costs of poor site content.
Small Catalog, Massive Risk
If most of your items are not online, your site is a BIG vulnerability. Distributors with only 20% to 30% ecommerce coverage risk losing significant market share as the digital purchasing shift continues.
Poor Product Attributes
Cutting corners on product attribute content leads to poor, insufficient information. For example, if you don’t have complete information on products and their associated variants, your catalog will lack content breadth. Without the detailed specifications for each variant, customers may not find exactly what they need even though you have it in stock.
Excessive Lag Time
Adding and updating content for new products and prices needs to be fast. If not, the online catalog leaves money on the table when your costs go up or launching new items. In both cases, slow cycle times equate to revenue and margin leakage.
Wasted Data
Manual data work generally leaves a large portion of vendor product data unused. Ignoring this rich data is the textbook definition of waste.
Can’t Find, Can’t Buy
Product content is critical to robust search capabilities. Without accurate, rich product attributes (also known as facets), customers may not be able to find what you have. Ease and effectiveness of search are two of the top criteria for onsite customer experience.
Slow Digital Evolution
Some customers may continue to buy some of your items offline forever, such as when products require associated services or configuration. But for routine purchases like consumables and generic parts, ecommerce or EDI are far more efficient channels. Distributors should encourage customers to go digital in these areas so they can improve operations.
Employee Burnout
Time spent doing manual data work takes away from other business activities like pricing, promotion and positioning. Further, the burden of endless data work on your staff can lead to inefficiencies, burnout and, ultimately, turnover.
Is Product Content Automation Possible?
In short, yes. It must be because digital leaders like Amazon, Grainger and others have done it. And so have our customers.
How do they automate product data work? They combine cloud-based machine learning, APIs and low-code techniques to perform ad-hoc data wrangling. You could build a solution for yourself with this tool set, but that too would be a waste of time. With the Wrangles platform, part of which is free and open source, you can deploy a custom data pipeline that reads, wrangles and writes your data in a few hours.
The key to our unique approach is efficiently transforming wrangling requirements into automated flows. With our Wrangles Excel add-in, subject matter experts and analysts configure DIY wrangles within minutes. Wrangles can be incorporated into simple, script-based recipes for end-to-end processing. With recipes, you have a configurable content factory to turn vendor product data into rich product content. Rich site, here we come!
Get Rich without Working So Hard
To win at ecommerce, you need a rich online catalog with the breadth, depth and insights customers expect. Manual data work won’t get you there. Only when you automate data work will you rise above the laggards and reap the benefits of digital commerce.
