It can be a challenge to keep up with the speed of today’s eCommerce industry. And the Automotive Aftermarket is a prime example of the challenge. At a size of nearly $400 billion across 535,000 individual businesses1, the Aftermarket sector moves a lot of product. However, it is a significant challenge to manage online inventory to save time, ensure consistency and control your brand while ensuring inventory both in store and online.
The key Automotive industry standards are ACES and PIES. The Aftermarket Catalog Exchange Standard is used to exchange information between automotive catalog applications. ACES helps users find aftermarket parts online (or in a physical store’s database) based on a certain make, model or year of automobile. The Product Information Exchange Standard is complementary to ACES and includes item information including brand ID, list prices, dimensions, weights, digital assets, marketing content, and UPC codes, among others.
Here are a few steps that an automotive parts supplier or retailer receiver can do to help keep everything running smoothly.
First, having accurate and complete Core product content is very important. From capturing or creating all the product information that will be required for industry standards (like ACES/PIES or GDSN) as well as retailer marketing needs (photographic imagery, product name, pricing, etc.), this Core content is the information that retail receivers require for product listing, and what enables shoppers to find what they need when searching.
Next, having a vendor provider with GDSN expertise in addition to ACES/PIES means that you can syndicate all your formatted content through a single solution provider partner. Syndigo is a GS1 certified GDSN data pool, and an elite-status member of GS1 US. This means that we work together with GS1 to better understand and define product content at the association level, so any changes are implemented quickly to ensure our clients have the most up-to-date standard.
Syndigo allows automotive aftermarket suppliers to efficiently publish clean, consistent data that meets your receiver requirements. We keep up with industry standards and validate data in real time against customizable spelling and grammar dictionaries, to ensure better accuracy and validity.
Here’s an additional step that can be helpful to aftermarket suppliers: Imagine being able to understand whether your product is displaying correctly online across your receivers, and what information may be missing. With Syndigo’s Content Health analytics, this is a reality today. A simple to read graphical dashboard shows how complete your information is at retail. Retailer data requirements change regularly, and for all the effort that goes in to creating and sharing your content, it makes sense to have track the success of your distribution.
Finally, syndication is critical. You need a supplier partner that not only creates content but that can also distribute it effectively to your receivers. Syndigo is the leader in true integration and automation with retailer receivers to ensure the best possible transfer of content through the ecosystem. What this means for our clients is that they no longer need to create multiple files for each receiver. Once the delivery frequency is defined, Syndigo handles all the delivery, including all ACES, PIES and GDSN submissions.
1 automotiveaftermarket.org industry trends
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