A focus on product content is especially critical when undertaking transformative e-commerce projects, such as migrating e-commerce platforms, onboarding new product lines or vendors, improving onsite and/or offsite search performance, or simply building an e-commerce site in the first place.

Backed by good content, the following types of projects can promise real bottom-line improvements, rather than just deliverables:

1. New e-commerce website build
2. Platform migration
3. New products onboarding
4. Site search optimization

Below we explore how each of these e-commerce projects benefits from a focus on product content. For more information on how to make great product content, download our e-book, “The Expert’s Guide to B2B Product Content.”

Project #1: New E-Commerce Website Build

Too often, when a company decides to launch or relaunch an e-commerce site, they relegate product content considerations to a future date. This is a mistake.

Product content is more than just the “raw material” that goes onto a product detail page. Successful content management requires important decisions about what information is most valuable and how it will be organized into an appropriate product information structure. Moreover, a site that treats product data as an afterthought will suffer post-launch when it comes to SEO and onsite search (see below).

Project #2: New Products Onboarding

Once an online store has established a taxonomy and has attributes that reflect how its customers search and shop, the next big challenge is to manage incoming product information.

Rich product data may be available from manufacturers and other sources. However, these sources rarely provide all the required data for every designated attribute, image, and information requirement. Transforming the content and filling information gaps to meet the organizing principles that govern a sites’ product content is an important product content projects — as well as an ongoing task.

Project #3: E-Commerce SEO and Onsite Search Optimization

Good product content is the backbone of any site search optimization project. It benefits both rankings with offsite search engines like Google and Bing and the user experience of onsite search tools such as filters and search bars.

As far as SEO is concerned, the first and obvious benefit of taking product content seriously is having product detail pages that are optimized for the product names and the associated keywords customers use to find those products.

Second, organizing products into a taxonomy that meets customer expectations will help users quickly find what they need, producing higher engagement metrics, which will register positively with search engines as “second order influences,” according to SEO authority Moz.

Finally, having robust product information that is specific to a site and organized to avoid redundancy will avoid offsite and onsite duplicate content — two missteps that often diminish B2B e-commerce site rankings with search engines, which have been “getting better and better at kicking websites down the rankings because of duplicate content,” according to Kissmetrics.

Offsite duplicate content is usually the result of using the same content manufacturers provide to all distributors and resellers. Onsite duplicate content, on the other hand, is a byproduct of poor product content governance and “makes it difficult for Google to decide which pages should rank for a particular keyword.”

For onsite search, robust product data is required to support the two tools that customers most frequently use to locate products: filters and search bars. Filters are the direct outgrowth of a rich, hierarchical product taxonomy and attribute system. And with good content, onsite search can be engineered to respond to varying terms customers may use (e.g., “bin” vs. “tote”) to facilitate cross-selling or to cross-reference products on multiple manufacturer model numbers, UPCs, or form-fit-function criteria.

Project #4: E-Commerce Platform Migration

Historically, many B2B e-commerce stores have operated with custom-coded solutions. But with the rise of enterprise-level, out-of-the-box e-commerce platforms and technology add-ons, many are looking to migrate to gain access to state-of-the-art features and efficiencies.
A migration e-commerce project is a great opportunity to reevaluate all the information that will be moved from an old site to a new one. Moreover, organizing, consolidating, and enriching the to-be-migrated product files will inevitably support the success of a new site.

Address Product Content Early on in Your E-Commerce Projects

E-commerce projects that account for product content from the outset will be set up for success. Not doing so is equivalent to opening a brick-and-mortar store without any plan for displaying the merchandise on the shop floor. This lack of planning leads to clutter, customer misunderstandings, and inevitable lost sales.

To find out how a partner specialized in product content enhancement, organization, and refinement can help by getting involved in e-commerce projects early on, contact product content solutions experts Altius today.

 

Deepika Ganapathi

Responsible for Revenue generation and Enhancing User Experience in e-stores

Supplier data comes in from multiple sources. Some may be adequate while some may not be. I would like to share my thoughts on how you can convert them into a data that sells for you.

The base data that comes in from your suppliers are those that your team uploads as part of providing information about your product.

Visualize this!!!

You upload your product data on a constant basis and your team is busy with loads of data to upload on a weekly basis. You have done an one time upload of the product data for a specific SKU and you are doing so many of those after that.

The previous upload of the data is ignored. You don’t know what facets of the data work and what does not. You often think about why those old products do not sell well.

It goes without saying that you are dependant on the product data from our suppliers since you only sell but do not manufacture.

However, there is a variety of data that comes in from multiple manufacturers and suppliers and hence the data will be a big garage.

You need to organize the data, standardize in a format which is easily digestible by the visitors.

The data should be simplified and prioritized based on the technicality of the product. The best use of the data can be felt not only by importing the data as given to you but also in deciphering the content.

Unfortunately, the data that comes in may not be in a direct upload format but would be in the forms of MRO, Electrical and Mechanical data. The data upload team needs to be supported by a functional team to help them decipher the data to upload the right kind of data.

A good knowledge in all of these data will help in the data getting high on technical ranking.

I have seen many instances where the retailers perceive the data that comes from multiple suppliers to be perfect.

However, the word docs or the pdf docs that comes from suppliers will be unique for each category and for the company themselves. It is a lot of work when the team wants to consolidate all these data in the backend.

Remember this, you have to make the product data content easy for the customer and not for the data uploading team.

This is how you can make your data sell for you.

How can you make it happen?

Use a combination of standardization and data enrichment process. Do it in multiple styles.

With a limited budget, you can map out the supplier data, migrate the standard supplier data into one standard acceptable format.

There are cases where you may feel that your data is still not unique in-spite of standardization.

You can add 3 or 4 additional attributes and can do the gap fill. You can add more specifications from the datasheet.

You can also benchmark a few named competitors and provide all the product categories if you want your product page to be the best among all distributors, you name your benchmarking competitors and give the product categories.

How can Altius help?

We can deploy full force to study multiple research on the category and the product. Our experienced team will understand the customer behavior for those product categories, collect the necessary fields or specifications. We will then coin or rank the list of attributes based on the customer buying or filtering behavior.

 

Govindaraj L

Responsible for Data Quality and Revenue Generation

Are you wondering why the success rate in getting visitors to your website is not that proportionately repeatable in converting them into customers?

The visitors find your product page the visitors are searching for. This is a high impact purchase for their company. They begin evaluating the product for the fitment of their needs.

The visitors are not able to find enough of information about the products they are looking for. They also know that the other 100s of competitors are one click away. They leave your website for others and don’t come back.

The efforts, money and time spent on getting the right customers to your website are going waste. This is because the product does not have adequate information that the visitors are looking for.

The Solution!!!

Data Enrichment – A+ Enhanced Product Content

It is the art of ensuring that the product page is complete. It is fair that you think that my supplier is giving me the data about the product. My IT team uploads only that data and why should I invest more money to organize the data.

I am not telling you that the data from your suppliers are not adequate. I am only asking you to look at the entire process from shoes of the customers perspective instead of looking from your point of view.

The product that you would upload should have a combination of data and images. How many times have you visited a variety of online stores for the sake of a Search for Information and Evaluation of Alternatives and have gone back to a store that has impressed you to make the purchase?

Can you recollect what impressed you the most? Was its ease of navigation of the product page, the product, the images, the information, the product, The UX (filtering mechanism), the ability to reach the product within a few clicks because hit understood your selection process? There could be many more parameters which would have made you make the purchase in a store among all the others.

There could be a possibility that your website may be missing some important parameters of configuring the product information in a better way that you have n’t thought about.

How can this situation be changed?

Let us look at the purchase process from a Buyers perspective. The buyers making a low involvement purchase or a routine purchase where they know what they want to buy may not look too much at the product information.

However, this changes if the buyers are making a high involvement purchase or you have some unique products that could be a potential replacement for the existing products that your buyers are using.

It is important that you provide enough of information about the product so that you influence the buyer in considering your product seriously. It is also proven that the lack of information on the product on your website may make your customers lose faith in your ability to deliver.

Even if buyers buy these products without lack of product information, there is a good chance that your return rates will increase because they would have purchased the wrong product.

So, it is important that you have a variety of parameters about the product data and should enrich your product with these types of data so that you can influence the buyers to buy the right products for them and come back to you because you have made their decision process much simpler.

 

Saravanan Baskaran

Observant to enrich & generate revenue for e-stores with the right product content and other SaaS Solutions.