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PIM Tool: Flawless Collection of Retail-Specific Content for eCommerce
Welcome to Gepard Features Hub, your essential source of insights into the vast potential of the PIM tool for elevating your eCommerce business. In this article, we talk about the Gepard content collection automation tool – the solution allows businesses to efficiently and precisely curate and maintain retail-specific content and ensure their products stand out on the digital market.
What Is Gepard Content Collection Automation?
How Collection of Retailer-Specific Content Works
How is retailer-specific product information working inside the PIM system? The next steps outline a structured approach to this process.
| Step | Description |
| 1. Centralize Your Product Data |
The initial step is gathering product information from manufacturers and all the data suppliers in one place (including product descriptions, prices, and images). PIM solution works as a single source of truth for storing this data, making it easy to access and manage it inside a single central hub. Example: A furniture manufacturer gathers all product information such as dimensions, materials, prices, and images from various sources and consolidates them into a centralized PIM system. This allows for easy access and management of all product data from a single platform. |
| 2. Understand Retailer Requirements |
Each retailer and marketplace has unique product requirements for product content, which makes it important to research these demands and tailor the data accordingly. For example, you might need to adjust the data fields, formats, standards, and taxonomy. Example: A manufacturer provides product dimensions info in inches, while the retailer needs this information in centimeters. Understanding such specific demands is crucial to ensure accurate and useful product listings that will be delivered to retailers. |
| 3. Customize Product Information |
Now it’s time to customize product information according to the retailer’s needs. It might include: adopting data fields, adjusting formats, and enriching the data with additional content (visuals, media, user reviews, and much more). Depending on the integration flexibility of a PIM system, the data can be enriched from different sources: it could be information from brands, eCommerce platforms, or content providers. The integration with the last ones allows you to nurture retailers with top-level and timely updated product content. Example: Following the retailer’s requirements, the manufacturer/brand uses the PIM tool to convert the dimensions from inches to centimeters. Product Information Management solution also helps to adjust the product descriptions to match the retailer’s terminology and style guidelines. |
| 4. Optimize Content for SEO |
It’s vital to optimize your product data (titles, descriptions, etc.) for search engine visibility. You can involve keyword optimization, improving ALTs, and incorporating other SEO techniques to enhance your products’ online visibility. Example: The manufacturer uses PIM to optimize the titles and descriptions of products by incorporating the relevant keywords (such as “oak dining chair” or “velvet sofa cover set”) to improve the products’ search engine rankings on retailer websites and other online platforms. |
| 5. Syndicate Content |
After the product content customization and optimization, it is syndicated to the retailers with the help of PIM (for example, Gepard Syndicator allows sending the tailored product content in the required format to the retailers and publish it on different eCommerce platforms. Example: A furniture manufacturer launches a new line of ergonomic chairs and utilizes the PIM tool for managing product data. Firstly, they will gather all necessary details about the new chairs and ensure the information is formatted to meet the unique needs of each retailer, such as IKEA, Home Depot, and local brick-and-mortar stores. Then, using the syndication feature in their PIM solution, the manufacturer automates the distribution of the updated product data to these retailers, ensuring each one receives the tailored information ready for publishing on their platforms. |
| 6. Integrate with Marketplaces and Retailers |
It’s an advantage when the PIM solution has extensive integration capabilities that allow you to connect to B2B marketplaces, content providers, eCommerce platforms, and retailers and seamlessly transmit the product data without any manual effort. With such a configuration, you do not have to worry about missing product updates or sending invalid data to retailers: product content will always remain current across all the sales channels. Example: The manufacturer is using a PIM system that is integrated with major online marketplaces like Amazon or eBay, and also with a couple of brick-and-mortar retailers, which allows for easy transmission of the data across multiple online and offline channels and ensures product updates in real-time. |
How did Gepard help eCommerce leaders automate product content flow to the top online retailers and marketplaces? Let’s review some notorious examples.
HP & Lazada: Helping Tech Giant To Expand to South-Eastern Asia Market
HP Asia Pacific was actively growing in the south-eastern Asia market, so one of the goals was to support its sellers on the Lazada marketplace, operating in Vietnam, Malaysia, Singapore, Indonesia, and the Philippines. The main challenge was to deliver updated retailer-specific product descriptions to Lazada endpoints. HP needed these descriptions to be standardized and adjusted to Lazada taxonomy, as well as adapted and delivered to 6 countries’ marketplaces and even to different sellers’ accounts.
How did Gepard deal with these challenges? Gepard used its extensive set of connections, namely Icecat content provider, to get the unique retailer-specific product descriptions for HP. Then, Gepard set up an automated product data syndication directly to the Lazada Open platform, according to taxonomies of 6 different locales and to each individual seller’s account. With Gepard Syndicator as a base, all the product description updates were shared across as many sales channels and platforms, as required, without any interference from HP.
As a result, the product descriptions were adjusted to meet the retail-specific needs, without time-consuming manual efforts, allowing HP to keep extending their markets.
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Automating the Delivery of Retailer-Specific Content to Amazon
This time, an already mentioned Hewlett-Packard (HP) needed to set up the delivery of retail content to their authorized Amazon distributors and, at the same moment, to have it standardized to meet the retailer’s taxonomy requirements (template structure and data model).
After spending thousands of hours adapting HP product descriptions of its sizeable product line to Amazon templates, the company was in search of automating this process. Each product description was made up of up to 300 fields with Amazon+ content.
Here’s how Gepard solved the problem of delivering retailer-specific content to Amazon. After Gepard gets a product data request from HP, the necessary enhanced product description is automatically imported from the Icecat content provider. After that, the Gepard PIM solution transforms the data to make it conform to the Amazon requirements. The adjusted retailer-specific content is later automatically delivered to the Amazon marketplace.
With the Gepard solution, HP eliminated the manual process of content collection and transformation and got the guarantee of error-free and timely updated product descriptions fitting the special requirements of the retailer. The technology leader started to launch its products faster on Amazon and outpaced the competitors.
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Retailer-Specific Content FAQs
What is retail product data?
Retail product information refers to different data types related to the products sold online or in brick-and-mortar stores. This term is usually used for eCommerce and includes product identification and product description, pricing, and promotion info, inventory and supply chain data, performance metrics and sales data, customer reviews, user-generated content, compliance data, visual content (images and multimedia), and more.
What is retail data management?
Retail information management includes collecting data from various sources, and integrating it into existing systems, organizing and storing the data, performing data analysis, sharing it with stakeholders, ensuring regulatory compliance and risk management, analyzing customer data for insights, and, importantly, employing a specialized software like Gepard PIM to automate most of the mentioned activities.
What Ready-Made Connections does Gepard have?
Gepard allows you to integrate with a variety of marketplaces (Amazon, Google, Bol.com, Rakuten, Zalando, eBay), retailers (Migros, Cool Blue, Cdiscount, MediaMarkt, Elkjop), content providers (Icecat, Tradeplace), eCommerce platforms (Shopify, Magento, Akeneo, BigCommerce, WooCommerce), and business messengers(Mattermost, Telegram, Slack), manage your product content in different data formats, and comply with numerous eCommerce standards.
Gepard PIM Tool: Your Ultimate Solution for Top-Grade Content
Retail environments become more complex, and customers’ expectations continue to rise, making investing in top-quality retail-specific product content unavoidable. Choose a time at your convenience and our eCommerce specialists will promptly contact you to discuss your content needs and explain how the Gepard PIM Tool can facilitate your content management.
