How to offer the best online product experience through product data

Distributors (marketplaces and marketing channels) require vendors to include a certain number of mandatory attributes to describe their products and suggest optional attributes which are crucial to providing a first-rate online product experience. By ticking all the boxes, you can provide an optimised experience and help consumers in their decision-making process. Aim to provide consumers with all the information they need to make their purchases. Enrich your product sheets with the following attributes:

• product name
• product reference
• price (in the appropriate currency)
• payment methods
• product variants (dimensions, colour, size, etc.)
• stock availability
• delivery costs, options and conditions
• clear and appealing image(s)
• brief but complete description
• guarantee terms and conditions
• customer reviews

This data can vary depending on each sales channel’s requirements as well as on business sector. For example, for food products, ingredients and allergens must be indicated. For furniture: weight, dimensions and assembly instructions. For medication: ingredients, usage instructions, dosage, possible side effects, etc. 

Titles play a key role in your product sheets. Not only because titles are the first thing a consumer sees when they look at their search results or open a page, but also because they want the maximum amount of information in the shortest amount of time.

Optimising your titles is essential to success. They should be eye-catching, detailed, clear and contain strategic keywords.

Examples:

• Product type + brand + category + material + colour + quantity
• Brand + category + product name + size + colour
• Brand + model number + product type + size + additional attributes

Be aware that distribution channels may require you to use their own terminology. This is the case with marketplaces, and particularly with Amazon, where the first letter of each word in a title must be in upper case.

These are the first two criteria consumers look at when buying online and therefore the most important.

On most sales channels, you won’t be able to modify price and delivery attribute values. However, you can play around with certain settings, such as by offering a discount when the price field is blocked, or by suggesting different payment methods, etc.

Real-time updates of your product feeds are key to a first-rate customer experience. See to it that any attributes that can change because of circumstances (price, stock, product variants, delivery conditions) are updated to reflect what you have in your shop.

An order cancellation due to lack of stock or a delayed delivery will have a negative effect not only on your customer’s experience but also on your reputation. The best solution for real-time updates of your product catalogue is a product feed manager.

One of the biggest problems in selling online is that it is impossible to guarantee that the buyer will be 100% happy with the product. For this reason, returns management is the third priority for online consumers, after price and delivery. According to an American study conducted by Forrester, product returns are mostly due to:

• wrong size
• quality issues
• damaged item
• inaccurate description
• wrong item sent

These are all optimisation levers: improving the description in the product sheet, guaranteeing secure shipping, but also more generally implementing a favourable returns policy to reassure the customer. This is even more important in the case of cross-border expansion, given its greater complexity.

Ultimately, using a product feed manager is the best way to ensure the quality and relevance of your product data, thereby guaranteeing a great online customer experience. By integrating Lengow into your business, you can:

• optimise your product feeds so that they meet the requirements of marketplaces and other sales channels, and therefore those of your buyers
• import your product catalogue, whatever its format (XML, CSV, JSON…)
• optimise your product data
• reduce listing time across all channels
• update your product feeds in real time
• automate certain tasks, such as product grouping, catalogue segmentation, channel-specific terminology etc.
• adapt your product feeds to foreign channels, e.g. translate content into required language(s), convert prices to local currency, etc.
• ‘clean up’ and format your product feeds or merge them with other data sources

Don’t delay – enlist a product feed manager and provide your customers with the best possible product experience to boost your online sales!