When buying products, understandable and clear product information is very important to make a good purchasing decision. This is true for both consumers and business buyers, but different customer groups often have different information needs. In addition, different channels for orientation and purchase may play different roles in their customer journey. Moreover, those channels have different (im)capabilities for displaying rich product content and digital assets. This makes managing potential buyers’ final experience of the offerings and specific pluses and minuses of your products a complex challenge.
This real-time management of product information, including inventory and pricing information, is also known as PXM, or Product eXperience Management. In addition to the collected and enriched product information, additional data is necessary, such as price and availability, users (reviews) and additional information about service and usage. All that data you want to share with a still growing number of channels. At the same time, you want to communicate content marketing and promotional campaigns to those channels: the product data stream and campaign and content stream come together here. This distribution of product data and campaign assets to all those channels is called syndication.
In B2B situations, product data often has to be shared directly with customers who have their own specific prices. For data to retail customers, a link to a data pool or broker such as GS1 is increasingly important. In B2C or D2C, on the other hand, a link to marketplaces, social media and, of course, Google search and shopping is needed. But not all channels and customers get all the data. The choice of which items to share with which channels is obviously driven by the organization’s commercial strategy and the budget available to publish those products on paid channels. Often, PIM/DAM and MDM solutions are insufficiently able to link quickly with a wide variety of sales channels and separate tooling is used for syndication.
In addition to being able to quickly link with a wide range of channels, some syndication solutions also offer modules to process orders directly from marketplaces, optimization tools for campgnes, connectors to analytics solutions and collect feedback from the channels such as rankings, reviews, out of stock and buy box information.
Squadra has the knowledge and expertise to support you and your team in choosing an appropriate syndication tool and implementing it into the existing IT architecture. For this we use a similar approach to the choice of eCommerce platform or PIM solution, in which we work with your team to develop functional and technical requirements into a Request for Proposal for various solution vendors.
If you want to know more about product experience management and syndication, also read our article in the Shopping tommorow book “Be the change“.