With no limits on the audience a brand or retailer can reach when it comes to scaling, e-commerce offers endless potential. But as many discover their cost, online retail is not a “one size fits all” deal. Growth comes at a cost – and the internal processes that serve you well during a phase of expansion can be stretched to a breaking point by a business that’s outgrown their current processes.
At the front line of any online retail business: products. In this article, we’ll look at three of the key features offered by ECP’s digital content experience platform and show the way they can help ease the product-related growing pains experienced by your successful, scaling business.
Feature 1 – Dual Syndication
Retailers and distributors need to ensure they’re leveraging all available product assets and information to promote them accurately. At scale, this can be challenging – and it’s easy to miss opportunities. Ensuring that all product assets are complete, up to date and accurate is time-consuming, and prone to human error.
Without the ability to pull data from a dependable source, the products you sell are at a disadvantage when it comes to conversion. Customers are likely to want additional information before they’ll make a purchase, so you either risk missing out on a sale, or place an undue burden on your support team. Additionally, you increase the chance of returns if customers feel they’ve been misled or are disappointed with the items they received based on their original portrayal.
If you’re a growing brand, then control of the way your products are perceived across all your various partner channels is essential. Having your products promoted with outdated imagery that doesn’t match up with your current direction can dilute your brand, so it’s in everyone’s best interests to ensure that product information and assets are easily accessible and accurately conveyed.
Enter, our dual syndication feature. This works by pulling product data and digital assets directly from brand catalogs – accurate intentionally curated, and complete! Automatically populating your product pages, brands can be assured that the latest product shots, assets and copy have been provided, while retailers are certain that they’re presenting their inventory in the most accurate and appealing manner.
Feature 2 – Clear Quality Scoring
As your online retail operation scales, it can be hard to keep track of where the gaps in your product content might be. Whether a brand or a retailer, if you’re offering a wide range of lines, with high numbers of products, manually trawling these to see which items are underperforming due to a lack of information or missing images becomes highly impractical. The bigger you get, the more exaggerated this problem becomes.
Gaps in your product content contribute to a poor customer experience – and this has a considerable impact on the overall impression your online presence conveys. In the age of omnichannel retail, consistency across all channels must be prioritized. Consumer expectations are high and need to be dependably met in order to retain their interest, and loyalty.
Brands and retailers leveraging our digital content experience platform can take full advantage of our quality scoring feature. This automatically scans your listings to provide instant, accurate insight into the products that fall below the threshold required for an informative and appealing offer. By getting a dependable view of the products which need your attention, your team can work in a targeted and much more efficient manner, filling in gaps and bringing all product pages up to the high standards you strive for.
Feature 3 – Streamlined Onboarding and Data-Driven Insights
Expanding product lines and brands represented (often coupled with a growing range of sales channels to be maintained and populated) means the need to onboard products more frequently without sacrificing accuracy.
Bottlenecks in onboarding can quickly cause issues around timely launches, impacting sales, marketing campaigns, and more. To deliver a consistent and reliable experience for customers, efficient onboarding of products is essential, impacting supply and meeting customer demand. Again, as you scale, this is a problem that you simply cannot afford to leave unaddressed, as it will only continue to compound.
Automated onboarding flows represent salvation to the scaling e-commerce retailer in this instance! They work to speed up the process for teams, creating more streamlined ways of working and facilitating easy collaboration. The AI-driven intelligence reports provided by ECP’s digital content experience platform also help by suggesting “next best actions” for team members, a process which can save time and aid productivity. Lean on this functionality, safe in the knowledge that the action you take is data-driven, not based on gut instinct or even internal “best practice.”
Scale Without Limits: Adapt, Adopt and Accelerate
Most e-commerce operations have ambitions to grow, scale and expand their reach. It’s essential that their back-office solutions can also flex to accommodate these goals.
Effective, accurate product onboarding is a big contributing factor when it comes to establishing an effective flow of new stock being brought online. Without investment here, the productivity and success of your sales channels will always be limited. So, explore your options and be ready to embrace success with the tools you need to scale without limits.
