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SUCCESS STORY

Adorama Snaps Picture-Perfect Product Data and Flawlessly Frames It with PIM

Adorama is a leading online and offline retailer of photography, video, audio, and computer equipment. Founded in 1974, Adorama has grown from a small storefront in New York City to a vibrant global eCommerce enterprise. Through its partnership with Syndigo, Adorama has:

  • Found an effective source for highly focused Enhanced Content
  • Improved its data management and allocation capabilities
  • Consolidated multiple technology and partnership needs into a single relationship

Adorama is more than a store: it’s a legendary hub for photo and A/V enthusiasts to learn, network, and grow. Its broad, yet focused, selection of products supports millions of customers around the world.

Going Straight to the Source for Better Content and Greater Efficiency

Product information, data, and multimedia are exceptionally important in Adorama’s highly technical industry. Products are often specific, sensitive, and not particularly cheap, so thoroughly describing their features and benefits is important for engaging customers and persuading them to make a purchase.

“Our customers are very discerning, very particular” explained JC Paget, Director of Product Data & Web Merchandising. “Newcomers to the hobby need to be assured that what they’re buying will meet all their needs getting started, and professionals are obsessed with making sure all the technical specifications are up to their standards. Having all the details right is very important.”

Adorama has long understood the importance of detailed, enriched product content, but hasn’t always had an effective way to source it. Previously, the company relied on 3rd-party resources to hunt down data about products from various manufacturers—a process that was not only time-consuming and manual but costly.

Shifting to a reliable source of Enhanced Content changed the game for Adorama. Enhanced Content includes multimedia, dynamic content, and interactive experiences that enable shoppers to learn more about a product’s benefits and uses.

This capability is especially valuable given Adorama’s selective shoppers and complex, nuanced offerings. So it’s no surprise that product pages for electronics products with Enhanced Content see an average add-to-cart lift of 27%.

By partnering with Syndigo, the retailer found a single source of Enhanced Content from a variety of prominent brands in categories from Photography to Home Electronics to Gaming and beyond.

Syndigo offers Adorama a direct line to vendors and manufacturers; a perpetual resource for the latest and most comprehensive Enhanced Content assets available on demand.

This connection enables the retailer to cut out the intermediary—and the excruciating wait and costs involved. Paget says the ability to go straight to manufacturers for Enhanced Content has improved the relationship with suppliers and given them a reason to work together for mutual benefit.

“We changed, drastically, the process to putting the content search to be more on the manufacturer since they’re the one who has the data,” shared Paget, “rather than have paying somebody overseas to go find it for us. This means better relationships with our vendors, because now we have an interaction that is about their product.”

Automating Product Data Distribution with PIMpoint Precision

Accessing data is one thing; collecting, storing and harnessing it to get the most possible value is another. The organization uses IBM AS/400 iSeries, a powerful but ageing database and operating system, to power much of its internal operations and logistics. Despite the flexibility of this platform, it was falling short of Adorama’s fast-changing needs to adapt to consumer expectations and stay ahead of the competition.

“We were gathering all our content on our AS/400 IBMi platform,” Paget recalled. “But it’s not a PIM. There’s a lot of things we wanted to be able to do on the website that we were not able to because we would have to build brand new stuff, or IBMi would not be able to do it. So it was really the right time for us to get a true PIM system to be able to manage our content better.”

PIM, or Product Information Management, is a means of managing all the essential product information that is needed to market, merchandise and sell products through digital and physical channels. The Adorama team identified that a robust PIM would give them better flexibility and creative ways to put products to market and improve the customer experience.

After weighing several solutions, they ultimately settled on Syndigo for their PIM solution. Paget noted Syndigo’s price, flexibility, and ability to connect with Adorama’s backend system were determining factors in the decision.

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Syndigo’s PIM empowers Adorama to orchestrate product content across all of Adorama’s sites from a single intuitive platform. It has opened up powerful new capabilities to reach customers and gain visibility online.

One example Paget noted was the ability to automatically pull content from several different SKUs into a single page for a product bundle.

This automation saves an enormous amount of time, pulling primary images from each of the products included in the bundle so the Adorama team isn’t stuck manually finding and placing each one. More quality, relevant content on the page not only improves the customer experience and keeps shoppers browsing longer; it also sends signals to search engines that it’s a good resource to send browsers to.

This edge is especially important for a relatively niche retailer with a specific focus of products and consumers. Adorama competes with enormous retailers and online marketplaces for sales; demonstrating expertise through quality and depth of content is an important way the company stands out to shoppers—and to Google. Syndigo’s PIM makes it easy to organize and allocate incoming product information and imagery from any source in the most impactful way.

This edge is especially important for a relatively niche retailer with a specific focus of products and consumers. Adorama competes with enormous retailers and online marketplaces for sales; demonstrating expertise through quality and depth of content is an important way the company stands out to shoppers—and to Google. Syndigo’s PIM makes it easy to organize and allocate incoming product information and imagery from any source in the most impactful way.

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