How Retailers Can Accelerate Commerce

Introducing Product Experience Cloud for Retail

We hear a lot about experience management these days. The customer, brands, and employees have all been the focus of the “XM” treatment and now PXM—Product Experience Management — is the latest discipline at the top of everyone’s minds, focused on delivering compelling and consistent product experiences across all touchpoints.  

PXM grew out of the need for brands to maintain consistency from inside their product information systems outward to their retailer syndication partners. But many solutions were initially focused toward supplier brands, charting how to efficiently deliver their product data from inside their organization out to multiple touchpoints like retail databases and e-commerce sites. And Syndigo has been a pioneer in connecting brand customers across platforms to deliver PXM to their data recipients, in the recipients’ language.

However, there’s an important aspect that often gets overlooked in the product experience conversation: The retailer perspective.

While sending product information to each of their recipient partners is a complex task for a brand, the retailer has the challenge of taking in this same information across a vast number of brands. The sheer volume of product information, across multiple vendors, in addition to the vendor information is many times the size of any one brand’s output. A single brand might have to deliver data for a catalog of hundreds or even thousands of products it sells on Amazon, for instance—but Amazon in turn needs to manage the incoming product content from over 1.1 million active sellers in the US alone!
And just as brand manufacturers are concerned about their brand identity, so are retailers. It’s an added challenge to accept data from many different brands, in different formats, and present it all in a coherent manner.

An even tougher challenge is making sure all that brand information stays current in real time while being displayed on the retailer’s own sites.

Syndigo has always believed that to serve the industry completely, we must serve the retailer and distributor side of the equation as well as the brand side. While the brand wants to retain their product information in the format that best suits their needs, the retailer recipient has that same right… and needs to ensure it ties back to the latest, most accurate data.

The Product Experience for Retailers

That’s why Syndigo developed the Product Experience Cloud for Retail: The only complete and composable solution designed specifically for retailers to manage and deliver accurate and engaging product information that customers expect on the sites they visit.

Syndigo Product Experience Cloud for Retail is unique in the industry: It is the only solution on the market to provide a robust, integrated PIM that allows for vendor product onboarding and real-time product scorecards for ensuring content is complete and up to date with the retailer’s requirements. This is a critical element of retailer PXM because without it, a brand must manually check each product’s output for completeness… or just hope for the best.

In addition, Syndigo Product Experience Cloud for Retail connects a brand’s digital marketing assets, known as Enhanced Content, directly on the retailer’s commerce site with no coding needed. This allows vendors to elevate the online shopping experience with rich content—including 360-degree product views, interactive image “hot spots”, and other interactive features—that increases conversion rates.

The final element of Syndigo’s Product Experience Cloud includes actionable analytics, providing retailers with insights on key metrics on content health, vendor data, customer segments, and distribution.

What’s under the hood? 

Syndigo Product Experience Cloud for Retail integrates several of Syndigo’s leading standalone solutions, all accessible through the Syndigo platform. Together they form the most powerful PXM solution in the industry for retailers to manage their commerce activities.  

Vendor Central

It all starts with Vendor Central, the place for retailers to initiate and manage all the elements of onboarding new vendors into their ecosystem, including address, EDI, insurance and other compliance data.

Vendor Central also enables item setup, where retailers can request new or missing items from vendors, as well as subscribing to verified product content already in Syndigo’s network (more than 1.5 million existing products). And if a retailer needs assistance to expedite setup, Syndigo can provide services to capture and verify data that meets retailer requirements.

Data collection is also included in Vendor Central, which allows retailers to display their latest requirements and data quality rules for vendors. This way product data and vendor interactions are centralized in a single solution.

Finally, Vendor Central includes important analytics that allow vendors to monitor data quality, with alerts to highlight opportunities to improve content health. These customizable reports provide evaluation options for the retailer to ensure they deliver clear, actionable priorities for their brand partners.

If Syndigo Product Experience Cloud for Retail only provided the elements in Vendor Central, it would provide incredible value to a retailer implementing PXM. But Syndigo connects even more capabilities.

Product Information Management (PIM)

PIM is a powerful solution to manage information within an enterprise. As part of the Syndigo Product Experience Cloud, a retailer can manage their product catalog of vendor data for internal processing. This helps to understand the entire product lifecycle from launch to discontinuation, using workflows, business processes, and automated data quality rules.

In addition, Syndigo PIM allows a retailer to manage relationships between products—such as cross-sell/up-sell, related accessories, and even bundles and collections. And with the ability to view and edit digital assets, the PIM provides digital asset management capabilities right inside the platform.

Combined with the powerful onboarding and analysis capabilities of Vendor Central, PIM ensures continual data completeness and quality at every step within the organization.

Vendor Master Data Management (MDM)

It’s challenging to intake product content from multiple vendors and brands. Beyond that, however, it’s also very difficult for a retailer to manage the vendor relationships themselves. Whether it’s tracking locations for invoicing and inventory, or maintaining the brand owner relationship to different products, Syndigo offers robust vendor management capabilities through its Master Data Management (MDM) domains.

Analytics

In addition to providing vendors with their own data quality scorecards, Syndigo Product Experience Cloud for Retail also provides sales dashboards and operational analytics, providing detailed views into category analysis, distribution voids, lost customers, and different customer segments and opportunities for highlighting complementary items. These reporting capabilities provide a continual feedback loop for the retailer and their brand partners to be able to sell more effectively.