Salsify Launches Industry-First Product Experience Management Platform

Top-Rated Product Content Management and Retail Syndication Capabilities Now Paired with Actionable Insights to Enable True Closed-Loop Digital Merchandising

Salsify recently announced the launch of its Product Experience Management (PXM) platform, empowering brands to deliver compelling shopping experiences for consumers across every digital touchpoint.

In the past, companies have deployed an array of point solutions in order to approximate the concept of PXM. However, this patchwork method has inevitably led to major implementation and time-to-market issues, increased costs, limited interoperability, and larger feature gaps, leaving brands with a bunch of solutions that still don’t collectively address their actual business needs of effectively growing sales and market share using digital channels.

Also Read: Salsify Product Content Management Platform First to Connect to Amazon’s New Vendor Central API

This latest expansion to Salsify’s software suite addresses the critical needs of modern brand manufacturers.

Recent consumer research found that 78% of US shoppers
would be more likely to buy if a retailer showed them
products with personally relevant images, videos, text, or reviews.

To win in this environment, brands need to intelligently activate and continually optimize their product content everywhere that consumers shop or otherwise experience their brand – whether that’s on ecommerce sites Amazon, Google, Walmart, Target, or their own website.

This is only possible through the use of PXM – the next step in the evolution of product information management (PIM). According to Forrester, the product experience management function is “the proverbial workbench for product managers and merchandisers to enrich content and create product experiences.”

PXM combines flexible product information management, advanced syndication, and actionable ecommerce analytics. The result is a platform that empowers brands to market products with the end consumer in mind. This shift enables closed-loop digital merchandising which helps brands speed time to market, build their brand online, and ultimately drive sales and market share.

Also Read: State of Digital Marketing Analytics in Top 1000 U.S. Retailers Report Shows Multi-Platform Adoption, Continued Growth

With changes in consumer behavior and shifts in retail placing today’s brands under increasing pressure, Salsify’s PXM platform represents an integrated solution to help brands shape compelling product experiences across multiple retailers and digital endpoints. As the next generation of Salsify’s already top-rated product information management software, PXM gets great product content to the places brands need it, with underlying syndication and analytics capabilities that support a fast and lightweight response to emerging changes quickly and effectively without unnecessary overhead.

“Salsify’s capabilities with PXM really speak to what we see as our present and future needs for effectively driving and influencing sales through digital channels. Online grocery within the US market is catching up with the rest of the world, and our efforts with Salsify will be integral to our success for rapidly addressing consumer wants and needs across the digital landscape as this market continues to grow,” said Omar Haque, VP & Head of eCommerce at Acelerada at Bimbo Bakeries/Grupo Bimbo.

Jason Purcell, CEO of Salsify, added, “Existing technology solutions were not designed to address the rapid pace of change in the modern retail space. In category after category, global brand manufacturers are losing market share and suffering margin erosion as digital increasingly influences consumer shopping behavior – not just at checkout but at every step of the buying journey. Salsify’s PXM platform gives brands the tools to both successfully accelerate the digital transformation of their business, while maintaining the agility needed to address tomorrow’s challenges.”

Salsify PXM acts as a highly flexible product information repository and content activation engine, with the ability to crawl, integrate, and store all of the metrics and signals about online consumer experience related to products and brands.

Rich workflow capabilities nimbly address the needs of larger brands, helping manage and drive the high volume of activity around administering product and brand information. This includes working with 3rd party agencies or technology partners to enrich the information, such as image processing or language translation. Additionally, Salsify PXM expands premier functionality with top retailers, including Walmart Rich Media. Instead of having to upload content on an SKU-by-SKU basis, Salsify’s unique implementation allows brands to create content templates to upload product content across entire product assortments for Walmart.com. This means large companies no longer have to pick and choose which products to invest in.

Also Read: Customer Data Is the Next Competitive Battleground Shaping the Future of Digital Marketing

Other Salsify-powered features embedded within the three pillars of PXM include:

• Product Information Management:
  Salsify’s product readiness dashboard allows users to view and edit product information they’re sending to a retailer prior to hitting publish, filter to see products in a given category, view validation errors, or quickly search for a specific product by the brand’s internal product ID. Additionally, new permission capabilities give brand managers the power to control which digital assets and products specific users are authorized to see and edit. Detailed audit history provides business users visibility into who changed what, and when.
• Syndication:
  Salsify supports and maintains the broadest set of retailer connections in the industry, and gives brands a comprehensive picture of their presence and performance on key, high-value retailers. A database of supported retailers is constantly updated and searchable on salsify.com. Salsify’s Amazon Marketplace connector enables first-party sellers to easily diversify into third-party on Amazon, giving them power and flexibility to deal with inventory challenges, resellers, and improve sales on long-tail products. Salsify also helps address digital product experiences on social networks like Facebook. Brands can use Salsify to directly push product content right into product-oriented Facebook ad products.
• Actionable Analytics:
  Salsify’s Insights uses machine learning applied across our cloud platform of more than 27 million products and deep retailer insights to drive a workflow of continuous content optimization. Analytics include product page performance recommendations, SEO product performance recommendations, brand compliance insights, and availability and buy box monitoring. This gives brands the ability to see exactly what buyers see on given product pages. This includes monitoring if a product is live and available on key retailers and understanding who is winning the buy box at what price. Brands can leverage this information to diagnose out of stock issues, lost buy box issues, minimum advertised price (MAP) violations by third-party sellers, possible counterfeit product listings, and other critical business considerations.

With consumers demanding increasingly personalized experiences, retailers adjusting to meet them, and brand loyalty progressively fickle across a number of product categories, the need for PXM software for brands has never been greater.

Recommended Read: 7 Tactics Every Digital Marketer Should Learn to Love in 2018