Mastering Omnichannel Retail: The Imperative of Powerful Product Data
Today’s omnichannel shopping experience is a modern marvel. How and where consumers shop is diverse and complex and can be done in a physical store, through online search, a direct-to-consumer branded website, on social media, through an affiliate program, and on marketplaces such as Amazon.
Consumers shop in a lot of ways — in stores, through search, on brand websites and through social media, affiliate programs and marketplaces — and retailers need to manage their product data through those environments in order to find success, according to Andy Delgadillo, director of sales for Feedonomics.
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Delgadillo said during his presentation at the Apparel & Retail CEO Summit, which was presented by BigCommerce and titled “Unlocking Retail Success: Strategies for Growth & Omnichannel Excellence,” that for retailers to succeed, they need a solid omnichannel strategy.
Retailers also need “powerful product data that will help you as brands better reach your consumers so they shop, browse or transact for your brand or on related affiliate sites,” Delgadillo said, adding that robust product data managed by the Feedonomics solution “is the connective tissue that connects brands to the different marketplaces and to different channels you might list and syndicate your products to.”
Delgadillo said product data management is critical to any omnichannel strategy that extends beyond traditional retail touchpoints and includes websites, mobile sites and new emerging channels such as TikTok Shop.
“With omnichannel shopping is it’s really no longer just an option, an omnichannel approach is an imperative,” Delgadillo said. “But given the audience for these other channels, you really can’t sacrifice listing products across the board and expect your customers to only visit your site; because ultimately, your shoppers are discovering and buying products across many, fibrous channels.”
To make it work, Delgadillo said, retailers and brands must have product data flow back and forth from various channels. Here’s how it works:
The data flows from the e-commerce or product information management platform through to a URL or API and then is fed into the Feedonomics platform to be optimized for sale on various channel purchase points, such as Google Shopping, Facebook, Amazon, walmart.com, eBay, TikTok or Snapchat. Feedonomics has integrations with major e-commerce platforms that include BigCommerce, Magento and Shopify, among others.
“The process involves data aggregation and transformation, and data optimization and connectivity to the right channels and destinations,” Delgadillo said, adding that the key is “optimizing that product data.”
Delgadillo said it “is a Titanic task to actually optimize productivity and product data. There’s a lot that needs to happen with product categorization, creating new meta fields and new keywords and titles to really improve the relevancy of a search result with whatever platform or channel shoppers might be looking at.”
To successfully “hit the mark,” Delgadillo said, retailers and brands need to “create clean and consistent product titles, descriptions and bullet points while ensuring an accurate and granular product categorization and populating key product attributes for all of your listings.” It’s also essential to have the right technology partners.
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