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How to Use Automated Scoring to Upgrade Product Content Across Your eCommerce Store

READ TIME: 5 MINUTES
January 11, 2023
Product Content

Product data is critical for retail performance, influencing sales, logistics, operations, marketing and more. The more complete and comprehensive it is, the better positioned your organization is to get ahead.

Just by having complex product content on your PDPs (Product Detail Pages), you can increase conversions by 6-36% compared to basic, barebones product content. The rich media and interactive experiences enabled by Enhanced Content can improve add-to-cart rates an additional 46.5%.

Here’s what one big box retailer found when it analyzed performance of different kinds of content on its site:

Getting the right product content you need is also essential to distinguishing your customer experience and crafting an eCommerce store that stands out from the competition.

Impact Beyond the PDP

Accurate, comprehensive product data has value to retailers beyond their eCommerce store.

For instance, you might want multiple angles of images of a product to feature it in a catalogue or weekly circular.

Precise weights and measures also have a big impact on efficiency for logistical matters like shipping costs, warehouse storage capacity, and in-store shelf planning.

And comprehensive product descriptions and details increases customer satisfaction with purchases and reduces return rates that eat away at margins. According to GlobalWebIndex, detailed and accurate product descriptions lead to a 42% dip in returns!

Read More: How Retailers Can Drastically Reduce the Rate of Return

The #1 Obstacle to Impeccable Product Content

It’s clear that product content health is essential to engage customers and keep retail operations flowing. But for retailers, getting all the information and data you need—and keeping it fresh and up-to-date—is an enormous challenge.

Why?

Retailers face many challenges in improving the quality of their product data and assets. There’s the logistics of storing and managing large volumes of data, technical challenges in combining and connecting disparate systems across the organization, and organizational questions about who owns and manages product data. However, these are largely all internal questions that can be remedied with thoughtful implementation Product Information Management tools and policies.

The bigger problem we see retailers face is an external one. They’re almost entirely dependent on input and buy-in from third parties—their vendors, manufacturers, suppliers and distributors—to deliver complete, quality content and information and keep it updated.

VendorSCOR: The Retailer’s Solution to Improving Content Health at Scale

For retailers with a high supplier count that process and sell a large catalog of products maintaining content health on your own quickly becomes an unmanageable task. Gepard reports that a retailer spends 1-4 hours of employee time updating product content or information for a single product. Scale that up to thousands of products that need constant attention, and the problem spirals out of control.

Amazon, for instance, isn’t manually measuring, weighing, and photographing every product on its marketplace. It relies on its millions of sellers to do that upfront work.

But that requires a LOT of cooperation and coordination—and generates a lot of touchpoints for something to go wrong. If the third parties supplying product fail to comply, or their data is incomplete/incorrect, it can tarnish your brand reputation and overall customer experience.

Fortunately, one solution automates the problem away: vendor scorecarding.

What is Vendor Scorecarding?

Broadly, vendor scorecarding is the grading and evaluation of vendors for compliance to certain rules and preferences of the customer/client.

In the case of retail product content, it means scoring your suppliers against what you expect from them in terms of product data, information, and assets for your retail goals.

Think of it like grading their homework.

Vendors that have all their weights and dimensions in your preferred format, supply high-quality product images, offer product descriptions in your prescribed wordcount and round out their PDPs with Enhanced Content might earn an A+! Those that have incomplete or incorrect work are scored on a sliding scale depending on how far from compliance they are…and might need to have a discussion about their performance if it’s too low.

Due to the scale of most retailers’ vendor networks, this work has to be automated in order to quickly and repeatedly evaluate the quality of product content coming in.

The Ultimate Product Content Scorecarding Solution for Retailers

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For retailers and marketplaces, there’s an out-of-the-box solution to monitor and rate product content at any scale across your eCommerce site: VendorSCOR.

This smart, customizable analytics tool empowers you to carefully evaluate every PDP (Product Detail Page) for errors, gaps, and opportunities—invaluable information which can be translated into prescriptive guidance for vendors and ultimately more conversions.

Your Site, Your Rules

VendorSCOR is easily customizable to rate PDPs to your exact preferences and specifications.

Perhaps you want to prioritize having lots of videos and product images from all angles to distinguish your shopping experience from competitors, or find through A/B testing that marketing copy in a certain format causes more engagement from your audience. Or maybe you want to distinguish a must-have format for your page titles and product names from a nice-to-have feature list at the bottom of the page.
Whatever your unique need, you can calibrate and weight your grading scale to enforce precisely the content experience you desire across different sites, categories and even specific vendors. 

Prescriptive Guidance

Take the guesswork out of optimizing PDPs for your vendors by automatically giving them feedback on their content and identifying places that need improvement, with specific guidance on what products need attention and what actions are needed for compliance. VendorSCOR sends regular updates so vendors can watch their progress over time and be notified when your requirements change.

Supreme Visibility into Content Integrity

VendorSCOR’s in-depth analytics suite comes with customizable dashboards that offer powerful insights both into vendor performance as well as consumer behavior. Retailers can find out which vendors and categories have the most problems, identify underperforming PDPs, and find out which combinations of content drive the most conversions.

Monitor, Measure, Prioritize, and Engage Your Brands

VendorSCOR makes product content collection, conversion, and optimization simple and scalable.

Click Here to Learn More and Get a Custom Demo

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