You have a B2B eCommerce website that functions well enough, but you recognize the content on your item detail pages lacks useful information. Perhaps your item descriptions are deficient, they suffer inconsistencies in style, or are not optimized for search engines. Maybe your items only have a couple attributes when you know there should be a dozen or more. Or, it could be they are missing important visual content like multiple product images, brochures, spec sheets, and instructional videos.
You know it’s time to do something about the quality of your online product content. Procrastination means you’re going to lose more customers to competitive eCommerce sites or “big box” players like Grainger or Amazon Business. But where do you begin? If you’re a wholesale distributor with tens – or perhaps hundreds – of thousands of SKUs, you may not have the resources to enrich product data for every single product you stock or sell – at least not all at once.
Here are three simple ways to prioritize your product data enrichment efforts so you can get moving with improving the online experience for your customers:
- The 80/20 rule – The adage states that 80% of your sales comes from only 20% of your inventory. By focusing on the items that turn most often, you can ensure the item detail pages that are most critical to your business success are also the ones that receive the most attention. It’s much easier to start with a subset of 10,000 items and then deal with the other 50,000 SKUs down the road.
- Customer focus – Many distributors choose to launch their new eCommerce website to only a select group of strategic customer accounts. In this case, you may want to enrich the subset of items that are most applicable to those customers. By focusing on the items that those accounts are most likely to purchase, you’ll instantly increase the value of your eCommerce site and improve your chance of customer adoption. Conversely, you may want to focus on a subset of smaller accounts that you want to push towards online ordering because you don’t want your sales reps spending much time on these lower volume customer orders.
- Defend your turf – If you have product that is easier to pick, pack, and ship than other items, there’s a good chance you have higher competition from other online businesses. Do you have items that people are more likely to search for on Google than your eCommerce site? By enriching product content for those specific items, you increase the chances that searchers will land on your site. Take a hard look at your inventory and decide if there are items that are more conducive to online purchasing, like lower margin items or product that is small enough to ship at low cost. Target content enrichment for those high competition items before you address your larger catalog of SKUs.
Unilog provides product content services that take your item data from barebones to robust, engaging content designed to attract buyers and convert them into online sales. We have performed content enrichment for many companies including Lowe’s, Grainger, Staples, Schneider Electric, 3M, and Orgill. In fact, Unilog is the company behind the Affiliated Distributors (AD) eContent catalog, which now contains more than three million enriched SKUs available to AD members.