January 14, 2016 
The e-commerce landscape is undergoing a significant shift. Marketplaces are rapidly becoming the go-to shopping destination for consumers, offering a vast selection of products and convenient shopping experiences. While this presents a tremendous opportunity for brands to reach a wider audience, it also introduces a new challenge – ensuring consistent and high-quality product information across multiple platforms. This is where Product Information Management (PIM) for marketplaces comes into play.
This is the first post in our PIM series.
Imagine that a potential customer is browsing online for a new phone. He needs to urgently buy the phone, but as he goes on a website, say – Marketplace.com, he comes across something like the image below.
What does he do? Does he buy, or does he not buy?
We’re guessing that either the customer moves on to another site to continue to shop or goes offline for his next mobile phone purchase.
If you are a marketplace, this is clearly not good news. Your customers come to your website looking for some information, and it is your job to provide them with the exact info, in the shortest time possible.
So is there a better way to retain shoppers on your website, and convert visitors into long-term customers? Happily, yes.
Product information management systems or PIM systems can help you streamline your data across all your channels. Read our post on business benefits of Vin PIM, here.
A marketplace has its own set of specific challenges, which can be mitigated via 3 distinct PIM software features:
High Quality of Product Data
Marketplaces often face issues with the consistency and relevance of product data, and this can negatively affect the shopper experience.
What does PIM software do? : Vin PIM ensures the availability of complete, accurate, consistent and timely data across channels. It includes:
- Data Standardization – This includes the setting up of standards, defining how a product information will be displayed on the marketplace and identifying data that fails to conform to the specified business standards.
- Data Quality Rules – The system applies custom business rules to your data to validate product records, as per business needs.
Benefits: So what is the implication of good quality data for a marketplace? The key benefits of improved data quality are manifold –
- Increased sales conversions due to rich product content –
For instance, when a customer comes across consistent product information on the website, this benefits both sellers as well as customers as a customer can purchase a product with the best value offers.
- It eases his user experience, increasing customer satisfaction and reducing the probability of returns. Also, it brings about drastic reduction of cart abandonment rates for the marketplace.
- Increased upsell and cross-sell opportunities by standardizing and analyzing product data attributes:
PIM software also helps in the upselling/ cross-selling of related products when the customer is finalizing his/her purchase.
In the example above, we can see that the product data has been leveraged to promote the complementary products to a prospect or a customer.
Keep reading for more on how PIM’s other two features can be leveraged for marketplaces.
Next in this series: PIM for Marketplaces Part II!
Any tips or questions for us? Leave them in the comments below.
