Optimise your Ecommerce sales by making your products shine

Ecommerce catalogue sales can be seriously damaged by the weakness in customer experience brought about by inaccurate or inconsistent product information. This can lead to sales abandonment or movement of customers to competitors. Product experience is now the name of the game and here are some tips to ensure sales can be optimised from your online/offline sites.

Optimise your Ecommerce sales by making your Product shine.

5 ways a PIM can quickly turn your product information into value

Customer expectations continue to outpace retailers’ technical and operational capabilities, and attractive, consistent and useful product information found on the finest digital storefronts has become a significant component of those expectations.

Furthermore changes in purchasing behaviour has led to an explosive growth in the array of channels, product communications has a more diverse role compared to what it was before: product communications are now form part of customer experience that is always up to date and suitable for each usage situation. Lack of access to complete product information means opportunities are missed and sales lost.

It has been well documented that over half online consumers abandon purchases because of inconsistent or lack of product information. Whilst nearly a quarter of products that get returned, due to customers not receiving what they thought they had purchased.

Not only is there a need to provide a great personalised customer experience journey but excelling in the product experience is key everywhere a customer may visit, not just touchpoints, but synchronisation everywhere on that journey.

This is sometimes difficult to achieve, the ability to keep up with pricing, promotional and product variations across all the channel outputs becomes arduous and sometimes chaotic without an automated, agile PIM.

In today’s competitive climate Ecommerce companies would be well advised to optimise where their revenues are generated, ie through their product information. All too often, competitive advantage is lost through lack of product focus to provide the ‘product experience’. In recent research Ventana found that whilst over 80% of organisations were striving for improved customer experience only 24% were happy with their product information.

Focus on the product has never more been important and using a PIM can deliver the necessary steps to increase sales.

1) Get up to speed quickly.

A flexible SaaS based PIM can be put into operation quickly (days not months) which means sales productivity can be in place almost immediately. Easy Integrations with ERP, CRM and other in-house systems ensures that information can be centrally managed through one system. This can enable product information to be moved out of department silos, and be far more accessible and streamlined for creation, update and completeness. By being easy to use, promotes greater buy-in for the Business case to drive to incorporate a PIM in the marketing toolkit. Marketers can easily be up to speed with a minimum of training and allows speedy time to market value for quicker sales.

2) Product Data Quality

By updating and creating product information in just one place ensures that product information is synchronised through every channel. Analysis on product information completeness and quality ensures the ‘product experience’ including images etc can presented in the best possible way .

3) Upsell / Cross sell

Related items in a catalog can be tagged and searched along with other attributes including colour, product type etc . Robust search capabilities make finding and managing products easy. It also enables a commerce site to provide complex search, filter and product comparison capabilities which help provide enhanced service to the customer.

Styles can be used to group SKU items together. These styles can have variant attributes. Attribute and Variant grouping can be used to filter search. For example, a marketplace sells a particular shirt style in multiple colours and sizes. The multiple colours represent one variant group while the various sizes represent another variant group.

4) Complete template for 3^rd party sales channels like Amazon, Google etc

Ensures completeness of product information to enable ease of access to the right information on other sites. Easy integration possibilities will allow new sales channels to be opened in minutes. Fast and easy onboarding means that companies can start reaping sales from their catalogues more quickly than before.

5) Syndicated services/Partner specialists. 

PIMs can provide speed and production power through its own syndicated services. This means that items like catalogues can be produced ready for print through simple plug-ins and APIs. Other services can bring additional help in extending and distributing the Customer Experience and as a result, more sales.

So in order to optimise sales from your Ecommerce catalogue it makes sense to evaluate how your Customer Experience is coordinated across every touchpoint by reaching into your product experience.

Can you afford to take the risk of not having a robust process in place?

Using a fast flexible PIM with your Ecommerce might just be the solution you are looking for.