How you describe your products and what you say about them when pursuing online retailing is one of the most important factors in the sale. In an online environment, shoppers can’t see or touch the products, so they rely on descriptors to tell them not only about features and benefits, but simply about the product itself. An August 2013 blog post from Emily Saka, with product content management software company Salsify, titled “3 Product Content Challenges That Health and Beauty Distributors Face” brings some challenges to light—and conveys ways to combat these challenges.
Saka writes in her post, “With no manufacturing-wide standard for delivering product details to downstream partners, many health and beauty distributors find that no two relationships with suppliers are exactly alike.” This identifies the vast array of ways product details can be relayed to a consumer via an e-commerce site.
Saka and Salisfy found repurposing product information can be difficult as well. Saka notes, “Even if a company has a content-rich e-commerce site, the data is not stored in a way that makes it possible to easily translate that information into a catalogue, for example. Without information stored in one place, employees must parse through hundreds of data sources every time they tackle a new project.”
And some of the solutions seem challenging from workforce, budget and time constraint viewpoints. Saka writes, “Most of the distributors I’ve talked to agree: it’s in their best interest to invest in some kind of software solution to make their processes more efficient. But how companies perceive their collective technical aptitude greatly influences how they respond to terms like ‘product content management system’—and smaller companies especially don’t tend to respond to it very well.”
Read the full blog post from Saka on e-commerce product content challenges here.
