Businesses are struggling to deliver a unified and personalized customer experience across all product and customer touchpoints. However, if you prioritize product data management, you can provide better user experiences.

Forrester Consulting’s study, The Future of Commerce Technology, surveyed 375 business decision-makers in North America and Europe to understand how they focused on product data management to enhance their customer experiences. About 62% of respondents said that they are planning to update or replace their legacy commerce platform system.

A customer immediately feels happy when an item they were searching for is back in stock and on sale, according to a Facebook ad they just scrolled by. Success! But when they visit the brand’s website to grab the deal, the item is no longer available, or they don’t find any information about the discount. Failure!

In this chaotic retail world, this scenario happens with almost all customers all the time. This is known as commerce anarchy: the struggle brands, retailers, and service providers face to manage the complex paths between products and consumers.

Causes of Commerce Anarchy

Internal factors

• Data: When your product data comes from multiple sources spread across various systems, it can cause chaos to find one source of truth. Hence, you must have a consolidated and centralized system to store all product information in one place to deliver accurate information to customers.

• Visibility: When your product information is on different platforms, you lose visibility into your channels, campaigns, and individual digital assets.

• Cost escalation: When your cost per sale increases and you repeatedly pay for the same processes, your product reaches the market slower than your competitors. If you don’t fully understand your total cost of ownership and potential synergies, you may fall victim to commerce anarchy.

External factors

• Channel proliferation: This increases complexity as brands attempt to navigate new ecommerce opportunities and channels as they arise. You must maintain a proper balance between how your customers perceive your brand and where you are available online. Unbxd PIM helps ecommerce stores enhance their sales by distributing enriched product content to marketplaces, retailers, and aggregators.

• Competition: When you are not well-equipped to manage commerce anarchy, you may lose to your competitors. New cloud-native startups and modern retailers that invest in PIM (Product Information Management) will inevitably win market share over those that haven’t yet invested in it.

• Regulations: Staying compliant is a must if you want to survive and win in ecommerce. But if you do not have a robust PIM solution to handle your product information, you won’t be aware of the regulations your organization has to comply with. When you manage multiple systems and processes, it’s often challenging to adhere to every regulation and standard.

Ecommerce anarchy results in high costs and low returns, slower time-to-market, increased product return rates, low customer conversions, increased IT and business operation costs, and loss of brand value. Unbxd Product Discovery Platforms’s AI platform helps retail stores boost ecommerce revenue and online conversions and improve shopper experience.

Combating Commerce Anarchy with PIM

Data challenges

Transactions and customer behavior create volumes of data that must be integrated with product catalogs to determine what works and who is engaging with you. Data challenges can be dealt with by an effective PIM solution that gathers, manages, and enriches product information to deliver the most accurate and consistent information to the customers.

Unbxd PIM allows you to gather, organize, transform, and deliver product information to multiple channels with less complexity.

Silos lead to anarchy

In addition to investing in advanced technology tools, you must consider a change in management. Considering the way all consumer touchpoints have evolved, you have very siloed teams. One team deals with social, one deals with the marketplace, and one with search. In most scenarios, each team uses its specific technology. This leads to inconsistency and anarchy.

With the Unbxd PIM tool, you will have consistency across all channels, resulting in better ROI and less operational complexity.

Dealing with voice shopping challenges

With new ways of shopping with devices like Amazon Alexa or Google Assistant, you must figure out how to present product information on a voice device. You need to know how your consumer is buying or browsing on those channels and design optimal ways of advertising for such channels.

Cleaning up your data

Any updates made to the product should be recorded in the PIM solution. When that information is published, it must come from the PIM. The PIM is all about maintaining updated and accurate data in a database.

Unbxd PIM provides exciting features so that you can focus on increasing sales and stop worrying about data management.

Manage commerce anarchy and achieve global commercial advantage

No matter how strong the technology your business uses, you cannot attract and retain loyal customers without a strategic approach. A centralized strategy lets you focus on delivering what your customer expects and providing them with a cohesive brand experience. This ultimately drives increased sales and revenue growth.

You can overcome the commerce anarchy and achieve a global advantage when you fix the platform problem. When you manage the complex paths between your products and customers, you can let customers make orders from the commerce chaos and win the race.

Use the Unbxd PIM solution for better data management and to combat commerce anarchy. When you have the right platform to deal with product information, you can constantly deliver an enhanced customer and product experience. It helps you to master commerce anarchy and win product orders consistently, increase product content quality, and create higher conversions, to name a few ways. Stores worldwide love using Unbxd.

Summary

• Brands, retailers, and service providers struggle to manage the complex paths between products and consumers, leading to commerce anarchy.

• The causes of commerce anarchy include data, visibility, cost escalation, channel proliferation, competition, and regulations.

• You can combat commerce anarchy with better data management using a robust PIM solution.

• Unbxd PIM provides you with top-notch features that help you increase sales and win orders while they focus on managing your data.

To know more about the workings of PIM, book a demo!