Helping Clients with Product Data

Having quality and well-organized product data is crucial to customers finding what they need and ultimately buying. Our article on Product Data Quality discusses some of the basic and more advanced principles of leveraging that data. Product Data Quality is the third of Layer One’s 14 Focus Points for M&D Success.

In this article, we share some of the tactics Layer One implements to help our clients achieve product data success.

Channel Readiness

First, we work with your product manager and team to establish the minimum acceptable threshold for product publishing and also the targeted standard. We advise on what achieves the best results, but ultimately the client decides what’s best for their business.

We then have automated processes that are regularly:

• Auditing the data for the presence of platform-specific data fields (title, short description, manufacturer number, etc.)
• Ensuring all needed attributes for search are present (dimensions in the right spot so a filter for 4” pipe returns the correct results)
• Confirming imagery is present and consistent (it’s at the same scale and orientation as similar products)

Taxonomy

The structure of the data sets or taxonomy is critical to a good user experience yielding more sales.

• We can roll up multiple varied taxonomies into a single ingestion point for your platform
• We help design or restructure your taxonomy to ensure it fits your customer's needs
• Sometimes, reducing or simplifying your taxonomy is best
• We right-size the depth of the structure
• We align the taxonomy with categories and filters

Brand Pages

Some platforms like Optimizely offer branded pages. However, these are typically user-friendly and primarily exist to feed search indexing (Google).  We build out these pages to be a powerful sales-generating tool for brand-loyal buyers.

For starters we:

• Advise in defining the content that should be present
• Enrich and enhance the data to be customer-focused
• Categorize by product type
• Boost the most purchased products for the brand
• Ensure all product linking is proper and live
• Configure search and autofill to display the brand page

Product availability

Most eCommerce platforms support real-time pricing and stock levels, but there are various business cases for not just showing the exact stock levels to customers.

We have built to following customizations:

• Green, Yellow, and Red icons to show stock levels
• When stock is out at the searched-for location display the next closest location with stock
• Rounding of stock levels
• Displaying “call for quote” when a stock level is at zero

ERP Integration

If you want to move from a catalog or quote-only site, your ERP typically needs to be connected to start making online sales. We build more than just the connections between the two.

Our integrations are:

• Fault tolerant- No lost orders, edge cases are accounted for, error checking with alerts
• Performant- using a variety of mechanisms to “cache” values from the ERP to keep the storefront fast and usable
• Scalable- built to support your storefront as it grows
• Expandable- can be used on other storefronts or sites
• Flexible- as structural changes occur a full re-write is not required

 

These are just a few of the ways we have helped our clients achieve online success with product data.
We would love to chat about any product data needs you have!

 

Product Data Quality is the third of Layer One's

To see the other 13, get the B2B eCommerce Distributors Success Guide!

 

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