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!

“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. 

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.

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.  

Keeping up with changing inventory levels and discontinued items is an overwhelming task for many merchants. The constant flow of large, unwieldy excel sheets from multiple vendors takes too much time to work through, leading to discontinued and out-of-stock items still listed on websites and available for purchase. A situation that creates more work through the admin of canceling orders with customers and the negative impact on your brand.

For eCommerce store owners, managing variants and parent-child product relationships are essential for maintaining your store’s digital products and eCommerce success. Variant management combined with categorization can account for up to 20% of the time spent on content management. But it doesn’t have to take this much of your time. Knowledge is power, and in this article, we’ll dive more into how you can simplify variant management and what tools are available to cut down the manual work and improve productivity in this area.  

Why is it Important to Reduce The Number of Product Returns?

With the increasing rate of technology and a worldwide pandemic, eCommerce shopping has been boosted to hit figures that weren’t meant to be reached for years to come. Additionally, with the holiday season upon us, eCommerce sales will be bigger than ever. But, with the increase in online sales comes the increase in product returns. 

What is SEO?

SEO stands for search engine optimization, which is a process of increasing the quality and quantity of traffic to your eCommerce site through organic search engine results. This means improving your website’s visibility, as the more visibility your site has in Google’s search results, the more likely you are to attract consumers.