Win on the digital shelf: How major retailers can centralise content and boost brand perception
As a major brand aiming to provide engaging product experiences to customers, how do you serve multiple online marketplaces with consistent, high-quality content?
In the fast-moving world of eCommerce, this is still a big challenge for many famous brands: ensuring product information, imagery and pricing are correct and consistent everywhere at once.
For a major brand like Bollé, with between 6-7k SKUs and 200+ digital catalogues, centralising digital product information and optimising content sharing modality is critical to ensuring consistency and brand perception across multiple marketplaces.
Bollé chose Salsify, the leading Product Experience Management (PXM) software, to accomplish this, and e-Comas as its implementation partner to bring the technology fully to life.
The challenge
Bollé was established in 1888, a French pioneer of molded nylon products. Its sunglasses and sportswear became famous all over the world, and today Bollé has particular strength in the specialty markets of snow sports, water sports, golf, tennis, cycling and outdoor.
Image Source: Bolle.com
Before Salsify, Bollé was using diverse solutions – an ERP system for its Product Information Management (PIM), the cloud for its Digital Asset Management (DAM), and OneDrive for content sharing. The system was unwieldy and complicated: it wasn’t centralised, so consistency was very difficult to maintain, and involved numerous personnel.
The Bollé team looked for unique technology that could:
- Centralise its digital product information
- Optimise its content sharing modality
- Boost brand perception via consistent communication of product data.
Bollé chose Salsify on the strength of its powerful offering to “win on the digital shelf”, and worked with e-Comas, a global eCommerce agency and official Salsify Solution Partner, to implement it company-wide.
Why Salsify was a game-changer
Salsify’s unified PXM solution is unique in the industry, enabling brands, retailers and distributors to optimise the product experience for their eCommerce teams and shoppers. Salsify’s capabilities that changed Bollé’s way of working include:
- The centralisation of product content in one single, user-friendly platform
- The connection to various sales channels (like the Amazon Marketplace and their DTC site) while complying to channel-specific requirements, making product content delivery quick and accurate on the digital shelf
- The validation of product content to ensure the data is accurate and complete
- The process automation saving time and money and preventing errors.
Salsify served Bollé as the centralised and intuitive solution for managing product data that helped them leave their previous hassles from disparate solutions behind them. By offering more than a traditional PIM system and going beyond the organisation of product information and accuracy validation of the latter.
Rising to the challenge: How e-Comas maximised the platform’s value
e-Comas worked closely with Bollé to set the team up with Salsify and ensure seamless integration with all endpoints, including Amazon and Bollé’s own website.
The Salsify specialists within e-Comas were able to:
- Hold multiple training and Q&A sessions with the key stakeholders from Bollé
- Configure Bollé’s data model to satisfy not only current endpoints, but also future ones
- Load Bollé’s full product catalogue on Salsify following the agreed data model
- Configure and test the SFTP feed between Netsuite and Salsify
- Upload all pictures and provide Bollé with the necessary tips and tools to start working on a centralised naming convention for all their assets
- Create a Digital Catalogue template to share product information both internally and externally in a simple way
- Configure and test a connection to Amazon US Vendor Central to enable direct publishing to said platform
- Configure several Insight Reports:
- Competitive Pricing Report
- US Amazon Buy Box & Availability Report
- US Amazon Map Violation Report.
And the result was…
As a result of implementing Salsify with e-Comas’ help, Bollé’s time-to-market was improved from the very first day, from weeks to a matter of days.
Salsify has become the single source of truth for Bollé’s product information and digital assets, with major time savings and boosted quality of product experience for end customers.
Brand communication consistency has improved across the digital distribution network.
Bollé says: “The main goal of the project was to ensure we can serve Amazon and e-dealers with optimised, consistent digital content.
“Thanks to Salsify and e-Comas, digital catalogue creation is now very quick and easy. Brand communication consistency across the entire digital distribution network has improved, and syndication is particularly great for new items.
“The quality, time efficiency, and external and internal requests of training factors speak for themselves.”
It’s a perfect example of how big brands can utilise powerful PXM software like Salsify to optimise their product content and boost their brand presence across multiple marketplaces and other channels like DTC websites, and therefore win on the digital shelf.
This project also shows the benefit of having a trusted expert partner like e-Comas to walk the team through implementation, and configure the software so that your content meets the needs of every marketplace for optimised product experiences and increased conversion.
Taye Mohler, VP of Partners & Alliances at Salsify acknowledges that “e-Comas and Salsify have successfully accomplished multiple joint customer projects like the PXM deployment at Bollé. e-Comas is a true expert, helping brands maximise their brand potential on Amazon and other online marketplaces. We are excited to build on our success stories to continue to grow our partnership”.