If you are looking for, or considering a solution for product data and working through how to evaluate the different options available, this article can help.  

One of the key opportunity areas driving businesses to look for product data tools is to accelerate the pace at which supplier product and price files are processed. Achieving this can allow for rapid expansion of a product catalog, or the shifting of a high volume of your team's hours from manual spreadsheet work, to more value delivering areas for the business.  

Outlined below are some essential functionality and criteria to consider as you evaluate different options on your journey to finding the best fit solution for your business.  

If you are receiving new price files frequently from multiple suppliers, you are likely spending time each month adjusting the new prices for your business and uploading these to your site. 

“I get updates on pricing from all of my suppliers every month. Updating pricing each month takes way too much time with hundreds of thousands of products and 10-20 price files”.

Shopify Community Discussion Site

For many, this process is lengthy, using key team members inefficiently on repetitive manual tasks. It is also risky, with bulk editors and uploads on several platforms notoriously finicky. You don’t need to dig very deep onto platform community pages to hear store owners share their horror stories of unwanted side effects to other attribute fields and other issues on their sites after a bulk edit or upload!

The best time to start preparing for Black Friday/ Cyber Monday is August, but the second-best time is now. 

“Garbage In, Garbage out…” or so the saying goes ...

The concept asserts that the quality of the information coming out cannot be better than the quality of the information going in. This saying is used in data science and manufacturing and often when talking about product data, like in this article, or this one. 

Today, we are here to bust that myth as it pertains to product data and eCommerce. With the right tools in place, you can put garbage product data in and output high-quality product data, ready for eCommerce. 

Ultra Commerce is redefining enterprise eCommerce. Vesta eCommerce reinforces the mission by reducing digital growth barriers through enabling organizations to soar past current product limits and increase product range no matter the complexity.

PIM systems have fast become an essential element of commerce, particularly for businesses with complex channel structures or those with several departments providing or working with product data through different business workflows.

PIM systems provide a central repository for product information, a single true source, and the tools to set up efficient workflows and processes for your business to operate like a well-oiled machine in managing products through their lifecycles.

Challenges with PIM systems

Some challenges come with PIM systems both in their implementation and ongoing management that can limit the value a PIM should provide. These are not to do with the functioning or quality of the software - but the crucial and unavoidable considerations of sourcing and aggregating product data to feed into a PIM and keeping that data up to date as products change over time.

What’s in a name? Well, quite a lot, it turns out, when it comes to product naming in your online store. Product names have an impact on SEO, on-site search and how effectively a shopper is drawn to a product when scanning a category page. 

Growing a product catalog by onboarding new products and brands is a natural way to scale many businesses. But as a product catalog grows into the thousands, the amount of time and resources needed to maintain the product catalog increases significantly.  That is why Vesta partners with retailers both as a product onboarding tool but also to provide the new processes and tools needed to manage this growth

Product data quality on your eCommerce site is critical for SEO, on-site search, navigation, and the shopper experience. The product information available and its presentation strongly influence whether a shopper will buy or leave your website. For retailers with large product ranges and product information sourced from multiple vendors – cleaning the disparate data received into a normalized format is a challenge. A challenge, most often met by manual manipulation in spreadsheets – a highly inefficient and unrewarding task. Automating these processes lifts this burden of time and cost, ensuring vendor data is standardized efficiently into a format ready for your eCommerce site.  

For eCommerce store owners, product data classification is an essential task in building their website and maintaining the digital products in their store. For those new to eCommerce, tackling product classification for the first time, the topic can seem filled with jargon and confusing terminology! Below we’ve provided a brief guide as to what product classification is and what each of the key terms means to help you get started.