It’s a cliché, but as with all clichés, it’s grown from a kernel of truth: retail is detail. Without attention paid to the finer points of presentation, your e-commerce store can never perform to its fullest potential.
Your product pages are right at the forefront of your operation – the final hurdle, and all that stands between a curious customer and successful conversion. As a brand or retailer, you’ll do whatever it takes to ensure they’re fully optimized. So, what are you doing to guard against product content degradation? Read on to learn more…
What is meant by Product Content Degradation?
Chances are you’re familiar with the term the “ecosystem of product” – the flow of products from the brand to various outlets (be that distributor, channel partner, or retailer) and eventually on to customers.
At every level of this ecosystem, no matter at which stage the products in question are presented for sale, there’s a need for high-quality product content. Product information (such as dimensions, attributes, and feature lists, vape flavour etc.) and digital assets (video demos, lifestyle photography or 3D, etc.) all have an important role to play in accurately portraying the items in question to curious shoppers.
This is where the issue of content degradation creeps into frame. As products pass through the ecosystem of product, they commonly suffer from the gradual erosion or dilution of the carefully curated information and assets produced by a brand to support and represent them to their fullest potential.
Why Is Product Content Degradation Such an Important Issue for Ecommerce Businesses?
Product content degradation may be something of an “invisible issue.” It won’t cause a page to break, and you may well still be selling products that are suffering from a lack of assets or information. But it’s a pressing issue and should still represent cause for concern for those involved across all stages of the ecosystem of product.
Complete product content is essential for creating informed purchase decisions, but also for creating and maintaining a clear and consistent brand identity. Products simply cannot be represented to their fullest potential with inaccurate or inadequate info and assets – a sub-optimal customer experience and a sub optimal chance of a conversion.
Without accurate product information retailers risk an off-put shopper, or a disappointed customer – could even be actively dangerous within certain verticals such as food and beverage or cosmetics where accuracy around ingredients and allergens is so vitally important.
When it comes to the brands that the products in question originate from, brand control becomes an issue. If channel partners are leveraging inaccurate or outdated information and assets, you rapidly lose your grip on the impression your brand is making across multiple sales channels.
How To Establish Best Practices That Avoid Content Degradation
The best way to avoid content degradation is to instill rigorous onboarding processes. As always in business, a balance of resources and results must be met here, and as is so often the case, this is where automation can play a helpful role. Automated onboarding flows, such as the ones enabled by ECP’s digital content experience platform, help to maintain better accuracy and avoid human error. They also reduce workload, freeing your team to focus on driving value.
Quality control is another important factor when it comes to sidestepping content degradation. In an ideal world, product pages would be continuously reviewed, and checked against expected conversion rates to identify any gaps in content that might be causing them to underperform. ECP’s digital content experience platform offers automated quality scoring – a feature that will instantly highlight product pages falling below the required threshold, showing your team where they need to improve and focus.
Finally, the jewel in the crown when it comes to eradicating content degradation: dual syndication. The third and final feature from ECP’s platform enables retailers and distributors to pull product information and assets directly from brand catalogs, ensuring that all content is accurate, up to date and fully sanctioned by the brand in question.
Protect Your Sales Against the Effect of Product Content Degradation
Product content degradation is a problem that harms everyone within the ecosystem of product.
Brands lose brand control, and their reputation is diluted when resellers don’t portray their products with the correct assets. Retailers miss out on optimized product pages. Support teams have more product-related questions to answer. Customers’ experience is negatively impacted.
ECP offers a wide range of features that can help in establishing a framework of preventative practices, so if you’re keen to avoid the growing issue of content degradation (especially if you seek to scale, as this is a problem that scales alongside you!) then reach out today to see how we can help.
