Productsup provides a SaaS solution for product content integration, optimization and distribution. Our aim is to help brands and retailers to stay agile and be at the forefront of digital transformation.
How Productsup fits into the commerce ecosystem
Create compelling, channel-ready product feeds, without a line of code.
Automatically distribute consistent product data across all ecommerce channels.
Seamlessly integrate diverse product data into your own system.
Product feed management and data syndication has never been easier. Built with the business user in mind, Productsup excels in usability and innovation.
Product content optimization can be defined as modifying or enhancing product attributes to ensure high-quality, complete, and accurate content. Traditionally, the task has been associated with the marketing side of the business. This is because it’s the marketing department within an online retailer who takes the product content from their PIM or shop system and uses it to create high-quality marketing and shopping feeds.
However, today’s online shoppers expect correct, reliable product information across all touchpoints, from an ad on Facebook or a listing on Google Shopping to a retailer’s website or offline catalog. So what does this mean for online retailers?
In order to create a consistent customer experience across every touchpoint and to maximize your revenue potential, the product content held within your PIM system or your “golden record” should be the best it can be – clean, complete, correct, and consistent.
Sounds simple, right? Well, while the goal is clear, most online retailers are faced with a few challenges along the way.
Online retailers typically receive product information from hundreds or thousands of different suppliers. Each merchant has a different way of providing information, which means the data sets that a retailer gets are in varying formats such as XML, Excel, plain CSV, or JSON, and from various sources. Moreover, merchant product feeds can often be messy, unstructured, and missing information – sometimes containing only the bare minimum.
So why don’t retailers just optimize their product content in their PIM system? Well, here are three key reasons why it doesn’t work:
Some retailers, in order to bypass the above challenges, decide to not optimize at all. However, a poor quality golden record has some major consequences, including:
So how can you make sure your golden record shines if you can’t optimize product content in your PIM system?
Using a product content integration and optimization software, you can merge together all vendor feeds, analyze the quality, structure and standardize the content, and submit it as a single, high-quality master feed to your PIM system. The graphic below shows how this works with Productsup:
This product content is called a Golden Record. In this article, we’ll examine the benefits of a high-quality Golden Record, we’ll provide a few examples of what types of optimizations can be done, and we’ll shed light on how to get started.
A high-quality golden record is essentially an online retailer’s golden ticket to success in many ways. Here are a just a few of the many advantages:
Today’s shoppers expect to see reliable, accurate product data across all channels. While they may do initial research on your website, they may then move to your mobile app to check pricing in more detail. A surefire way to lose customers is to confuse them with inaccurate or mismatched product information. For example, if the content in a retargeting ad, later on, is not the same as the content on your website, this will confuse customers- losing you the sale. That said, if your golden record is high-quality – consistent, clean, correct, and complete – you are automatically ensuring that shoppers will find reliable, accurate product data at each touchpoint with your product.
Your revenue potential is directly related to the quality of your product content inventory. If your PIM contains high-quality content, it will appear so across all of your channels (website, catalog, POS, and mobile app), which will improve the shopping experience – thus increasing your revenue potential.
One of the most obvious advantages of a high-quality golden record is simply the amount of work it will save you later on. Essentially, when it’s time to create marketing feeds, you won’t have to clean and standardize your data and you can go directly to channel-specific optimizations.
Since a high-quality golden record eliminates the need to clean and standardize data during the marketing feed creation process, you’ll be able to get your products listed or ads running a lot quicker. Naturally, this also means a quicker payday!
Now that we’ve covered how a high-quality golden record works to your advantage, you may be wondering how to ensure one that shines. Let’s take a look at a few examples.
Before we get into the specific optimizations or integrations you can do to improve the quality of your golden record, take a look at this outline of events:
Step 1. Find a powerful software capable of data integration, optimization & analysis
Step 2. Merge all of your merchant feeds into a single master data record
Step 3. Analyse and determine where optimizations are needed
Step 4. Clean and standardize existing content
Step 5. Add additional content with third-party integrations
Step 6. Submit a single high-quality feed to PIM
Essentially, if you find the right software from the beginning, the rest of the steps will be a breeze. However, there are many tools out there that can be used for data integration, but not optimization – so look carefully for a software that has it all.
Once you’ve merged your merchant feeds into a single master feed, you can move on to analyzing, cleaning, and standardizing it – here are a few examples of how it can be cleaned and standardized:
Once you’ve cleaned your initial master data record, you can then shift your focus towards adding additional product content. Here are some examples:
With a dedicated product content integration & optimization software, you can standardize, clean, complete, and optimize a single master data record in bulk. Then, it can be submitted to your PIM as a single, high-quality feed. Luckily, this is a Productsup specialty.
The Productsup software can integrate with virtually any source – no matter how many or in what format.
Looking for a software capable of handling millions of products? No problem! Our clients export roughly 310 billion products per month from our software, so it’s safe to say our 800+ clients around the globe are managing their massive feeds quite well!
Productsup is filled with a variety of preconfigured bulk-editing boxes (250+ to be exact) and features to make optimizing an inventory of any size a piece of cake.
Productsup was also cited for focusing on product information syndication, vendor portal, and data onboarding, and PIM/marketing lifecycle hybrid in Forrester’s report, “Vendor Landscape: Product Information Management (PIM), Q3 2017.”
For SAP Hybris customers, maybe we should also mention Productsup Data Syndication 1.2 was one of the first products to achieve SAP premium certification for integration with SAP applications.
Want to learn more about how Productsup enables you to ensure your golden record is genuine gold? Request a web demo, it’s free!
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