PIM

Achieve e-commerce growth with product data.

January 1, 2024 · 4 min read

E-commerce is always expected to grow. At some point, your own product range will reach its limit. So then you can think about expanding your range or using new sales channels. If you are going to do that on a large scale, your product data is a critical success factor.

Online spending and purchases are growing steadily every quarter in the Netherlands. E-commerce teams are therefore often given a higher target to achieve by their managers. Two growth strategies are reviewed at a given moment:

1. Expanding assortment: The fastest way to do this is to add products to your own product assortment that you do not produce yourself and do not have in stock yourself. In technical terms, this is referred to as the term “longtail”.
2. Use new channels: You can reach a large audience directly via marketplaces such as Amazon, Real.de, bol.com or shop-in-shop constructions.

A combination of both can also be interesting: selling your own assortment in combination with a longtail assortment via marketplaces or shop-in-shop formulas. Whichever form you choose, the key to success lies in the product data. And to be more precise, first in the product master data. Only then in the improvement of product data in the light of conversion optimization. Perhaps product master data is not a sexy subject, but oh so important when you are talking about longtail or extra sales channels.

Product Master Data.

With product master data we mean the essential product data that is used to classify, register and trade a product. Such as article number, classification, supplier information, availability information and for example price information.

• Longtail: When you go big, you want to automate the inclusion of longtail products in your systems. If this is not the case, you will lose a lot of time to constantly manually process extensions and updates. Think of price changes, changes in availability or adding new products. If you have to do this manually for hundreds, or maybe even thousands of products, then there is really no point in starting. Especially since this happens every day. And these are the basics. This is where you need to automate, using product master data.
• Sell smarter: Again, manually keeping track of hundreds of products in different marketplaces is almost a full-time job. You have to constantly make sure that the availability is updated to avoid backorders. You have to constantly remove products and add new ones manually, and you have to constantly keep your sales price attractive. Compared to your own margin and the changing prices of your competitors. Again, the key here lies in automating that product master data.

Growing with business logic.

In short, to grow online quickly and efficiently with longtail products, you want to be able to apply certain business logic to your product range to save time with your team. In other words, you want to be able to set rules in your system that automatically perform updates on changes in product data that suppliers of longtail products provide. In any case, you want to automate changes in product availability and the addition of new or replacement products of an existing product via master data.

You not only save a lot of time, you reduce the chance of errors and are always up to date. You can also go further. For example, think of automatically calculating the sales price. Here, adjustable price rules can be advantageous: for brand X within product group Y a 2.5% surcharge and brand A within product group B a 4.2% surcharge with rounding to a “clean” sales price, such as €99.95. Only for products where it really pays off do you then perform the manual fine-tuning of the sales price. If you are in an industry where you have many distributors with an overlapping product range, you can also apply the so-called “deduplication” via automation.

Multiple suppliers with different prices and availability are now tracked for one product, after which you can use business rules to determine which supplier is preferred.

Marketplaces.

Even when selling large numbers of products via different marketplaces or shop-in-shop constructions, automation across the axis of product master data is your friend. Think of business logic to publish a series of products to a marketplace, update products that are no longer available and, for example, schedule a weekend promotion for brand X and Y. And of course you can do more with business logic. Such as automatically forwarding price updates to marketplaces.

Automating Product Master data pays off!

So, are you going to seriously work on supplementing your current product range with a longtail range? And/or are you going to sell on many more sales channels? Then think carefully about automating product master data. It pays off. It frees up time for other important matters. Such as making product information more findable for search engines or enriching product information to increase your conversion.

These are the kinds of subjects that the e-commerce professional must have time for. Really working on trade is also so much more fun than manually entering products and having to adjust them. And you can do that with a PIM system that is not only suitable for managing commercial product data such as images, product texts and specifications, but is also suitable for automating product master data such as price and product availability. Product master data may not sound that exciting, but it is oh so powerful if you want to grow your e-commerce turnover.

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