Marketing Your Product Catalog Data:Using Your Storefront Data For All Marketing Efforts

Many online merchants do not have an effective data management system to market their most up to date product catalog through the various marketing channels. These channels include affiliate sites, comparison shopping engines, mobile commerce and other shopping destination sites available to them online.

Or, if they do have a "data management system" in place, this system relies on methods that often lead to marketing outdated products that are not consistent with the most up to date product catalog information residing within the shopping cart. The result is "outdated" product catalog data marketed into marketing channels which leads to a myriad of issues.

In either scenario, it is essential that:

1. The online merchant understand how critical it is to market data that is functionally the same as the data that is on their online storefront, and

2. That online merchants are provided a methodology and a process to ensure that the data they market is consistent with what appears on their online site.

In the ramblings that follow I will answer these questions:

1. Why using your storefront data should be the "initial" access point to use when marketing your online storefront, anywhere and anytime?

2. What key elements of the data you use for marketing needs to be consistent with what you have on your online storefront "right now", and which should not be consistent (there are times for this too)? and

3. How often does your marketing information need to be updated to maintain concurrency?

Why Using Storefront Data Should Be The "Initial" Access Point For All Marketing Feeds

Let’s look at two completely different scenarios:

The consumer sees your product(s) on a Comparison Shopping Engine, and likes what he/she sees, so…they click over to your site only to find that the product they saw on the comparison engine is exactly what they see on YOUR site, same price same product…very happy consumer.

The consumer sees your product(s) on a Comparison Shopping Engine, and likes what he/she sees, so…they click over to your site only to find that the product they saw and liked on the Comparison Shopping Engine is more expensive than it was on the previously viewed page…very angry consumer!

If that isn’t enough to grab your attention, the Comparison Shopping Engines, in an effort to please their consumers, intend to provide the most accurate information possible. If merchants stand in the way of those efforts, most Comparison Shopping Engines will cancel the offending merchants’ entire product feed, even if there is just one offending product.

The storefront software or service you choose, for the purposes of online territories, is the central point where everything happens = the nucleus that drives your ecommerce engine. All other applications, services, or products you might choose to use for online endeavors must be able to (and should) "communicate" with your chosen storefront software or service. The two main reasons for this are related to efficiency and accuracy.

Efficiency – If your storefront data drives your marketing data, it saves valuable time, and eliminates unnecessary steps in the marketing process.

Accuracy – The typical point of sale for online endeavors is at the storefront, and if marketing data is not similar to storefront data, the merchant loses the consumer immediately, and probably for future purchases too.
When it comes to adopting the function of marketing your product catalog data outside of your storefront to numerous marketing channels many online merchants do not know what to do.

They are often forced to create separate files and/or spreadsheets, based on their storefront data, that they then place in a separate folder to send to the various marketing channels. Often this file is created for the marketing department or other folks to use for marketing purposes.

The problem with this manual procedure is that often when changes are made to your online storefront catalog data these changes are not reflected in the file that was "replicated" for marketing purposes. In other words, the nucleus that drives your ecommerce engine is no longer what drives your online marketing efforts. Problems ensue, technical issues occur, frustration with marketing channels lead to cost overruns, and all of this results in counter productive online marketing.

The simple solution to all of this is not to "replicate/duplicate" files that are based on data that is always being updated on your storefront and rather go right to the "product catalog source data" that resides in your shopping cart. By using your "source data" as your starting (being introduced to consumers) and end point (point of sale) the online merchant can ensure that the data sent to any destination outside of your storefront is accurate with reference to the "product catalog source data" that appears on your shopping cart.

How To Ensure That The Data You Market Is Consistent With Your Storefront Data

This can be easy or it can be hard. You choose.

The hard way is to constantly compare your "marketing data files" or "spreadsheets" with your storefront source data, product for product, and make adjustments daily.

The easy way is to create, or use an application, which pulls the data you use for marketing purposes from your "source product catalog data." AND then make sure that this application automatically updates your marketing data every time "someone" on your team updates information in your "source product catalog data", or at least as often as you feed to marketing entities.

MerchantAdvantage has developed such a tool – Channel Management – that can be auto scheduled to do this for any online merchant and provide a product date file from their storefront platform. Online merchants can now continue to keep the two sets of files consistent with each other – namely your shopping cart data and the files that you create from that shopping cart data for marketing purposes.

There are service based companies that also can do this for you, and they are excellent, but these solutions can be expensive for the small to mid-sized online merchant. If you are like many online merchants, who like managing, marketing and controlling their own data feeds then use a tool based solution so you can save time, headaches and money while ensuring that you consistently market only the most update to date storefront product catalog data to all of your marketing channels. These tools allow small to mid-sized retailers to compete in the online retail marketplaces.

How To Ensure That Updates To Product Catalog Data Are Carried Through In Real Time To All Of Your Marketing Channels = The Process

So now that you are on board as to why using your "product catalog data" that resides within your shopping cart software is critical. Now what?

If you are determined to continue to create a separate file/spreadsheet based upon your product catalog data and then update that manually to ensure accuracy, may we suggest that you don’t! We only foresee problems with this method. If you still insist, then you need to ensure that:

1. The product URL pages, image URLs, prices and other categories are exactly the same as your storefront data,
That you update this file/spreadsheet whenever you make changes to your storefront data BEFORE sending a feed to any marketing channel,

2. That you adjust the perhaps somewhat cryptic content which serves its purpose on the storefront to be more marketing friendly, and

3. That you rethink using this method!

My recommendation to those using a feed management tool system, such as Channel Management by MerchantAdvantage, is to:

1. Schedule an import of your product catalog into your marketing feed system daily
2. Create business rules to adjust your product content in a way which will maximize consumer interest while maintaining content consistency in fields such as price, product URL etc…
3. Feed the adjusted content to selected channels
4. Assess the performance of those feeds using analytics
5. Adjust content, selected SKUs or Channels as necessary for better performance
6. REPEAT 1-5, as necessary

Helpful Hints and Wrap Up:

No storefront software or service can do all that an online merchant requires, especially when managing data feeds to dozens of marketing channels and shopping destination sites.

Given the many new methods to market online today, many shopping cart software packages or services do try to keep up. However, often times it is more cost effective and intelligent to compliment your existing software package or service with a vendor’s product or service that is more robust.

When you do choose to use software that enhances your ecommerce engine, it is mandatory that the new vendor’s product "speaks to" and "works seamlessly with" your existing shopping cart technology AND also that the storefront technology you decided to use allows for other products to work with them.

Once you are confident that these last two points are true, it is important to use an application/tool to effectively market your product catalog data on an ongoing basis. Once you are certain that the data you want to market is consistent with your shopping cart data, you can then begin to manipulate the marketing of that data into certain channels, as you desire, by appending unique marketing language to a marketing channel feed.

Only then can you be confident that:

1. The data you are marketing is consistent with what a consumer will see on your storefront when they come to make a purchase, and
2. That the online marketing channel you are using never cancels your product catalog feed for product inaccuracies between what you market and what you have on your storefront.