/Insights/Salsify & Codal: Streamlining product experience management across multiple channels

SalsifyandCodal:Streamliningproductexperiencemanagementacrossmultiplechannels

Oct 23, 2023

4 min. read

Codal partners with Salsify to help eCommerce merchants optimize their product experience across various sales channels, from DTC websites, to marketplaces, to social media. Click here to learn more.

Salsify is revolutionizing how eCommerce merchants manage their product information, offering a suite of tools that help centralize data, automate time-consuming workflows, improve speed to market, and increase conversion rates.

When transforming the eCommerce experience to achieve lower costs and higher scalability for our clients, we often bring in Salsify to update their legacy product information management (PIM) system, or lack thereof.

In this article, we’ll discuss why we partner with Salsify, the value of product experience management (PXM), and how this partnership has helped our mutual brand and retailer clients solve complex problems and reach their eCommerce goals.

“Codal and Salsify have combined for multiple successful PIM + commerce deployments. Codal is a true champion for their clients and we are excited to continue to grow our partnership.”- Taye Mohler, VP of Partners Alliances at Salsify

If your business is currently relying on disparate, inefficient processes that lead to missing or incorrect product data, slow product content updates, and other similar issues, keep reading!

What is product experience management and why does it matter?

To boost customer engagement and sales online, many brands execute a multi-channel strategy, whereby they sell products through various platforms—from DTC websites and mobile apps, to marketplaces and social media channels—with the goal of providing a more complete and accessible buying experience for all customer types. After all, some customers may prefer making purchases on a DTC site to take advantage of reward points and discounts, while others may prefer Amazon or Walmart for their shipping speed and convenience. The experts at Salsify call this diverse collection of touchpoints “The Digital Shelf.”

Here’s the problem: Different channels have different requirements when it comes to adding and editing product content, which creates scalability issues for businesses that are rapidly growing, acquiring new brands, implementing new sales channels, adding new products to their catalog, and so on. To avoid time-consuming, error-prone back-office workflows, growing eCommerce businesses need a centralized and intuitive solution for managing cross-channel product data.

Salsify defines PXM as software that helps brands manage, syndicate, and optimize product content, with the goal of enriching the customer experience. This includes and expands upon the functionalities of a traditional PIM system, which focuses exclusively on organizing and ensuring the accuracy of images, descriptions, logistics, and other product information.

What is Salsify?

Offering the industry’s only unified PXM solution, Salsify helps brands, retailers, and distributors optimize the product experience for both customers and employees through superior content and operational efficiency. The goal of this solution is to:

Centralize product content from disparate sources onto a single, user-friendly platform.

Connect to various sales channels so that product content is delivered quickly and accurately, based on channel-specific requirements.

Onboard product content from other brands to meet the retailer or distributor’s requirements.

Validate all collected product content to ensure that it’s optimized for merchandising.

Automate the above processes to prevent errors and save time and money.

With Salsify, admins can seamlessly make cross-channel updates to better merchandise their products and drive conversions. This often involves the deployment of enhanced content—like videos, 3D images, comparison charts, and so on—to make product detail pages (PDP) less boring and more immersive.

Case Study: Replacing spreadsheets, flat files,headaches with unified PXM for a leading health wellness retailer

ExpressMed —an online retailer providing a wide range of health and wellness products from the industry’s top brands—came to Codal in need of a superior eCommerce experience. In particular, the company sought a more seamless customer experience with a more flexible, cost-effective technology stack. Our partnership with Salsify played a critical role in achieving this for the client.

As an eCommerce brand accelerator, ExpressMed lists and manages products online for hundreds of brands, including McKesson, Tena, and Attends—totaling more than 8,500 products. These products are available on ExpressMed’s DTC site, marketplaces like Amazon and Ebay, and big-chain retail sites like Walmart and Target. Each of these channels dictates unique uploading and formatting requirements for product descriptions, images, specifications, and so on—which, as mentioned above, creates scalability issues for fast-growing retailers like ExpressMed.

The ExpressMed team was using spreadsheets and flat files to manage product experiences across all these channels, costing them significant time and effort. Whenever a product needed to be added or removed, or its details—such as the design, materials, or dimensions—needed to be changed, the internal team would have to manually update the flat files for each applicable channel. This issue was exacerbated during COVID-19, as the number of consumers purchasing health and wellness products through eCommerce channels exploded.

To help ExpressMed save time, money, and effort, and ultimately enhance the product experience for its network of brands and their customers, Codal recommended Salsify. Implementing Salsify’s PXM solution completely transformed the business’ legacy system by replacing numerous spreadsheets with a single database. Updates to product content are made via a user-friendly dashboard, then automatically replicated across all applicable channels. In other words, a process that used to take hours or days now takes several minutes, and the risk of human error is mitigated.

To learn more about our work with ExpressMed, you can read the full case study here .

Get started with best-in-breed eCommerce tools

As an enterprise design and development consultancy specializing in eCommerce, Codal transforms organizations from the ground up by evaluating, recommending, integrating, and optimizing best-in-breed tools like Salsify.

Given our long standing relationship with Salsify, we’ve gotten to know the product team, witnessed the technology grow, and implemented the solution for numerous clients over the years. This means we’ve got the experience and expertise to prevent integration issues before they occur, efficiently escalate and resolve bugs, and maximize the value of the platform for the client—based on their unique goals, and with respect to their timeline and budget.

Topic

Unified commerce

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