How Effective Product Data Syndication Skyrockets Your Growth

In the digital economy, product data is more than just data. It is the vanguard of brand engagement and the surrogate of physical examination. And in order to stock the “digital shelf”, businesses not only need to store, enrich, and publish data but also share product data with trading partners effectively. The challenge here is distributing data feeds to multiple sales portals and marketplaces that require different content standards and compliances. The discipline of Product Data Syndication (PDS) is therefore imperative to ensure that the right data is delivered to the right customer touchpoint, at the right time.

“As a larger share of total commerce is conducted on digital channels, product information syndication applications are becoming increasingly essential for sellers to compete.”
- IDC Worldwide Product Information Management and Syndication Applications Forecast

Product data syndication provides a common platform to edit product content and carry out customizations while complying with enterprise business rules and quality standards. It boosts collaboration between retailers, distributors, partners, content service providers, and marketplaces through advanced integrations and standardizations. By sourcing information directly from your PIM (Product Information Management) systems, PDS eliminates the risk of outdated product information across the distribution value chain in an economical and efficient way.
Five ways in which product data syndication amplifies your growth are:

• Reducing costs: Companies without automated syndication spend excessive time and money in maintaining their product content distribution strategy. With hundreds of spreadsheets that require detailed monitoring and manual upkeep, they deploy equally high numbers of human resources and applications. After all that expense, the process of supplying data is still plagued with slow processes and error-prone results. Product data syndication can eliminate such costly, manual, cumbersome, and inefficient processes. For instance, a manufacturer can have product data stored in multiple internal systems. Without product data syndication, several employees using spreadsheets and data pools, as well as CSPs (Content Service Providers) will all be involved in exporting data in the desired format. This is not only time-taking but also costly. PDS can cost-effectively replace these systems and automate the processes of gathering information internally, standardizing it for each channel, and pushing it out based on the needs of various marketing and sales platforms. This way, PDS also eliminates expensive re-do cycles.
• Providing superior brand experiences: PDS enables customer-centric experiences across B2C, B2B, and B2B2C interfaces for improved customer engagement and experience. It is especially instrumental in pacifying the digital-savvy customer who conducts extensive research prior to purchase and expects current and comprehensive product information ubiquitously. By syndicating product data, enterprises can take control of the metadata scattered across the organizational landscape and map the product’s attributes to channel attributes for optimized product discovery, minimum navigation, and maximum relevance. With a holistic view of content aggregated from multiple sources, channel communications can be synchronized and enriched to ensure fresh feeds, data accuracy, and experience consistency. Enterprises can also use PDS to align marketplace integration with personas and segments and remain abreast of shifting consumer behaviors to maximize reach. Leveraging data as a strategic asset, PDS can result in creating personalized buying experiences resulting in higher customer-brand affinity.
• Automating vendor data feeds: When can one find time to scale business or expand reach or innovate product lines when the internal teams are busy juggling the requirements of different channels? Digital commerce has a long, multi-entity value chain infiltrated with static workflows of the product classification system(s), catalog adjustments, taxonomy and structure updates, format and label assortments, etc. Automating these vendor feeds is a priority to enable business growth. PDS can achieve that with fast, efficient sharing of data with retailers, supplier portals, distributors, content service providers (CSPs), internal staff, and others. It can eliminate disconnected systems, integrate siloed teams, and makes it easy to address trading partners’ different format requirements. It can enable automatic tracking of individual vendor systems and internal solutions to update data and supplement inter-domain collaboration. PDS is also capable of unifying different data domains as per requirement, thereby reducing the cycle times for onboarding product information and assets and simplifying vendor communications.
• Accelerating time-to-market: Automated distribution of product content feed to all sales channels and touchpoints itself speeds up product launches. But when that data is properly syndicated, it also adds a layer of accuracy, consistency, and intelligence — thereby reducing review cycles. PDS collects data changes from multiple sources in real-time and updates them in the data syndicator director before making changes on distributor webpages. It has powerful data transformation and validation capabilities to automate data imports and processing with built-in templates, data mapping, and more. It can support the exact requirements of multiple predefined channels, including data standard definitions, networks and protocols, packaging hierarchies, validation rules, and communication configurations. With PDS, high-quality product data can be optimized and exported to the right channel/portal/distributor at the right time and in the right format. It can reduce the complexity of managing data requirements during the launch by fostering agility, improving collaboration, and strengthening trust between value chain partners.
• Driving better revenue: Syndication of product data and digital sales have a directly proportional relationship. Syndication can help increase brand visibility and reduce lost sales due to delays in product feed pipelines of distribution channels. It can ensure that when new, revenue-driving opportunities present themselves, brands are ready to pursue them without engaging resources in channel-centric data synchronization. PDS can catalyze the synergy between the distributors, marketers, retailers, and manufacturers to create a customer touchpoint that is user-friendly, comprehensive, updated, and highly responsive. Effective product data syndication can help open new sales channels, facilitate product development, accelerate launches, and ensure that products are discoverable and desirable. It can empower businesses to pivot towards revenue opportunities by adjusting strategies to avoid the pitfalls of declining products and categories. Apart from nurturing downstream relationships with vendors, it can also help in analyzing business data against the broader landscape of the market.

Conclusion

The verdict is clear: one data does not fit all. Each channel and each vendor has a predefined format of content that cannot be ignored in digital commerce. As a result, publication and synchronization of product data is a critical competency for growth. One must put product data synchronization into good use to centralize systems, cleanse and structure formats, contextualize information, and distribute content automatically across the trading network.

The post already published on Dzone.com