You can achieve e-commerce growth with product data

E-commerce is always expected to grow. At some point that stretch will run out with your own product range. So then you can think about expanding the range or using new sales channels. If you do this 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 often given a higher target to achieve by their managers. Two growth strategies are discussed at some point:

Expanding the range: The fastest way to do this is to add products to your own product range that you do not produce yourself and do not have in stock. In technical terms referred to as “long tail”. Using new channels: You can immediately reach a large audience 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 range in combination with a long-tail range via marketplaces or shop-in-shop formulas. Whatever form you choose, the key to success lies in the product data. And to be more precise, initially in the product master data. Then only improve product data in the light of conversion optimization. Maybe product master data is not a sexy topic, but it is oh so important when you talk about long tail or additional sales channels.

Product Master Data

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

Longtail: When you bet big, you want to make the inclusion of longtail products in your systems automatic. If this is not the case, you will spend a lot of time constantly manually processing extensions and updates. Consider price changes, changes in availability or the introduction of new products. If you have to do this manually for hundreds, or perhaps even thousands, of products, then there is actually no starting point. Especially because this comes back every day. And these are the basics. So here you have to automate using product master data.

Sell smarter: Here too, manually keeping track of hundreds of products in different marketplaces is almost a day's work. You must always ensure that availability is updated to avoid backorders. You have to constantly manually remove products and add new ones, and you have to constantly keep your selling price attractive. Compared to your own margin and the changing prices of your competitors. Once again, the key here lies in automating that product master data.

Growing with business logic

In short, to grow quickly and efficiently online with long-tail 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 up rules in your system that automatically update changes in product data provided by suppliers of longtail products. In any case, you want to automate changes in product availability and the addition of new or replacement products for an already existing product via master data. Not only do you save a lot of time, you reduce the chance of errors and you are always up to date. You can also go further. For example, consider automatically calculating the sales price. Adjustable price rules can be advantageous here: brand You only carry out manual fine-tuning of the sales price for products where it really pays off. If you are in an industry in which you have many distributors with an overlapping product range, you can also apply so-called “deduplication” through automation. Multiple suppliers with different prices and availability are now kept track of one product, after which you can use business rules to determine which supplier is preferred.

Marketplaces

Even when selling large numbers of products via various marketplaces or shop-in-shop constructions, automation over the axis of product master data is your friend. This includes business logic to publish a range of products to a marketplace, update products that are no longer available and, for example, plan a weekend promo 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 get serious about supplementing your current product range with a longtail range? And/or will you sell on many more sales channels? Then think carefully about automating product master data. It pays. It frees up time for other important things. Such as making product information easier to find for search engines or enriching product information to increase your conversion. It is these types of topics that the e-commerce professional must have time for. Really working on the trade is also so much more fun than manually entering products and having to adjust them. And you can do this 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 e-commerce sales.