Online content is growing everywhere. Global trends…. The US, being the largest for consumer commerce has shown great growth against an entrenched brick and mortar infrastructure.
Canada has also shown strength in eCommerce in the past few years. As a percentage of total sales, eCommerce has grown from under 3% of total sales to 7.8%, reaching CA$52.5 billion according to Statistics Canada. According to eMarketer earlier this year, forecasted eCommerce sales in Canada could reach US$79.80 billion in 2022, up 10.4% year over year. The firm expects that growth to remain in the double digits through 2023 and reach more than $104 billion by 2025.
What’s driving the growth? Obviously the pandemic has caused major changes to shopping behavior. However—and perhaps as a result—the way that businesses have approached selling to shoppers has evolved in quite a short time as well.
This explosion of online selling has had a ripple effect up and down the line of retailers and brands. Product content was important online, but perhaps secondary to in-store merchandising and advertising via traditional mediums. online selling a necessity, a whole new set of information and requirements was necessary. …
Quality Data Management
As with most things in business, it’s important to start with a strategy: Knowing your ultimate goal and defining how to get there. It’s the top-down process that helps to lay out business actions specifically. Since data is core to any business, your strategy should include data quality management. It shouldn’t be a “check the box” afterthought, but rather a defined way to ensure the information you use to run your business is inspires trust in the decisions that need to be made.
A good strategy will include having a structure for organizing and governing your data, to guide future decisions as your business grows. This also sets a foundation for managing more complex data structures. Check out our post on data strategy for more depth on the matter.
Data that is old or incorrect are obvious things to watch out for, but changing recipient requirements also can be problematic and hard to monitor. For example, a retailer may require new or additional descriptive information that causes existing item listings to become incomplete. This can hurt ranking results, which can hurt sales.
These changes occur frequently—Syndigo implemented more than 600 Requirement Set changes in the last quarter alone. That’s nearly seven updates to requirements per day. It’s important to work with a partner that has a large network of retailer and distributor clients, to monitor and implement these requirements in near real-time.
The Efficiency of a Single Source
If you have had to deal with multiple applications, people, or suppliers to accomplish a single task, you know the added time and effort it takes. Whether you’re working across departments or companies, the more sources you need to connect, the more opportunities there are for errors.
Syndigo’s approach is a more integrated one. By building our solution for the purpose of eliminating the roadblocks that can contribute to incorrect or missing product information, we can provide a comprehensive process that ensures your data gets to the right place in the right format. Check out our overview on how to make the most of your eCommerce approach to learn more about the steps in the process.
Enhanced Content and quality PDPs
Core Content gets you listed online. Enhanced Content is what sells. Together, they make a winning Product Detail Page (PDP). To maximize the effectiveness of your online listings, it’s important to meet the requirements for retailers and online sites, and also ensure you are using as much rich media and other Enhanced Content as possible. Syndigo has found that adding Enhanced Content to your listings can deliver as much as 90% lift compared to a basic page. So don’t skimp when it comes to Enhanced Content
Because eCommerce sites all approach their online merchandising in their own ways, they all have slightly different content requirements. it’s crucial to rely on a supplier that understands and manages these retailer taxonomies—providing an added layer of expertise to ensure your content is great. Here is a helpful eBook for suppliers and retailers on the importance of adding Enhanced Content.
A Two-Sided Network
We have heard it from brands and retailers, that each needs their product information listed in a particular way to support and protect their brand image and meet their internal requirements and formats. That is why our focus has always been on working with all sides of the industry as clients, and creating a data structure that enables both brands and recipients to leverage their information as needed.
Other providers may claim to represent both sides, but when a discrepancy appears it is often deflected back to the client to troubleshoot and resolve. With the largest two-sided global network, the Syndigo approach is to work with each client, to help them collaborate effectively understand what is required—by whom—to kick sales into high gear.
Canada growth: https://www.straight.com/finance/report-shows-online-shopping-sales-in-canada-grew-nearly-300-percent-in-5-years
Canada sales for 2022: https://www.emarketer.com/content/canada-s-ecommerce-sales-reach-nearly-80-billion-2022
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