Getting Started DIY vs. Partnership Approach

Some distributors try to handle enhanced content in-house, but the volume and complexity of B2B product data make this costly and slow. McCoy’s Building Supply spent more than a decade manually capturing data from their vendors. But they said even the vendors didn’t have enriched data about their products. “It was a struggle,” admitted Kevin Shute, Director of Merchandising at McCoy’s. “Unfortunately, it took us 13 years to learn that we couldn’t do this ourselves in the long term.”

Creating, enriching, and managing thousands of SKUs requires dedicated expertise, tools, and time that many teams simply don’t have. It can also lead to inconsistent data and missed revenue opportunities.

On the other hand, partnering with an experienced provider gives you access to proven workflows, industry best practices, and scalable resources. A trusted partner can accelerate your time to market, maintain data accuracy, and help you adapt as your catalog grows. In most cases, partnering is the most efficient and cost-effective way to deliver the high-quality product content your customers expect. Once McCoy’s partnered with Unilog to do their heavy lifting and enhance their product data, they saw immediate results. With enriched, complete, and current content on their site, more of their web pages became indexed by Google, resulting in higher rankings in organic search results and an increased number of page views. “The more products with enriched data that we add to our site, the better results we get,” stated Shute.

Product Content Subscription Services

Product content subscription services give distributors a cost-effective, scalable way to enrich and maintain their catalogs without starting from scratch. With a subscription, you get ongoing access to curated, enriched, standardized product data for the SKUs you need. This data can be used for eCommerce, ERP systems, print catalogs, or anywhere accurate product information is required. Unilog’s CX1 Content Subscription is a strong example, which gives you access to a library of over 10 million pre-enriched SKUs, plus flexible SKU access, continuous updates, and easy syndication through the CX1 PIM to keep product information fresh across all your sales channels.

ARG Industrial subscribes to Unilog’s enhanced content to drive more traffic—and conversions—to their site. “I’m surprised at how well our products appear in search engine results with zero dollars spent on SEO,” remarked Mike Mortensen, President & CEO of ARG Industrial. “Our website is often right underneath the paid search, sometimes above the manufacturer’s website. That’s been an added benefit I didn’t realize we were going to get.”

Custom Content Services

Working with a partner for custom content services means you don’t have to tackle complex enrichment alone. Instead of relying on generic data, a dedicated team can help you build, fill gaps, and organize your product data to match your specific taxonomy and customer needs.

Unilog’s CX1 Content Services team works side by side with you to create accurate, enriched, and normalized content. We handle custom SKU creation, attribute mapping, taxonomy design, digital asset sourcing, and more. This ensures your content isn’t just complete, it’s tailored, competitive, and ready to help you sell more, faster.

For nearly 10 years, The Macomb Group has utilized Unilog’s content services to enrich, standardize, and normalize their extensive product catalog to industry standards and group the SKUs into parent/child relationships. Their enhanced 45,000 SKU catalog is unmatched in depth and value, enabling the wholesale distributor to become an indispensable resource for their customers. Jeff Fouchia, CIO of The Macomb Group, said, “I will put Unilog’s product content up against anybody’s—they are second to none!”