In our 2021 study commissioned with Forrester Consulting*, industry leaders shared the challenges they faced with eCommerce content. A great majority noted that integrating their data sources were the largest concern, followed by difficulties in measuring the effectiveness of product content to deliver on their objectives.
Here is a highlight of what business leaders struggle with as they look to manage and measure their eCommerce performance.
Value in Integration
Earlier posts from the Forrester Consulting study focused on the challenges and barriers to producing and maintaining great product content. Looking forward, suppliers see the value in an end-to-end solution that can help them create, manage, syndicate, enrich, and optimize all their content, rather than cobbling together information across multiple point solutions.
Across the board, almost all suppliers (94%) say an end-to-end solution such as this is valuable or extremely valuable. Regionally, Latin America rated significantly higher, with 97% listing an end-to-end solution as valuable, and 71% listing it as extremely valuable.
Rules, Not Exceptions
Some variables did come out as more or less important within such a solution. For example, the highest rated variable in total was the need for automatic content updates to recipient partners, based on recipients’ changing requirements, at 66%. This speaks to the enormous challenge for suppliers to stay up to date across multiple partners. It is common for some retailers to change their requirements regularly based on seasonal needs or expanding category definitions, and the ecosystem itself is complicated with new products, sometimes warranting different or multiple categories.
Regionally, Latin American suppliers responded even more strongly about having recipient rules automated systematically, with 73% ranking it as a top-three choice, higher than Europe (69%) and significantly higher than North America (59%).
The other features highlighted as top-three choices were having content and analytics integrated in the same solutions, with content ingestion, optimization, and syndication capabilities also ranking highly. Therefore, while essentially all suppliers want an end-to-end content system that can integrate the different stages of product content management, distribution, and optimization, they don’t always agree on exactly the same capabilities that are most important. This speaks to the need for a platform that is both powerful and flexible, to meet marketers’ differing needs.
* Commissioned study of 360 global directors and decision-makers for product content management strategy, by Forrester Consulting on behalf of Syndigo, February 2021
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