Tech Guest Viewpoint: Five Things to Consider for SKU Onboarding

By Mihir Kittur, co-founder and chief innovation officer, Ugam



2015 is seeing enormous growth in the number of product SKUs listed online, and e-commerce and content managers will be tasked with the rapid onboarding of those SKUs. However, adding SKUs alone won’t be enough; they also need to have the right assortment and the right price and deliver a better shopper experience.



Retailers can compete more effectively with differentiated and engaging content, but they need to focus on improving product content before scaling assortment to efficiently improve the shopper experience and drive conversion. This is critical for multichannel retailers too. According to a report by PwC, “Total Retail 2015: Retailers and the Age of Disruption,” 73% of the shoppers have browsed products online, but decided to purchase them in-store.



Below are the top five things retailers must consider as they set up their online assortments in 2015:



1. Develop Data Standards for Product Catalogs: Retailers need to review, update and (as applicable) develop style guides to clearly define product information requirements and standards. This is a critical step as it serves as a necessary guide to a whole host of subsequent activities including product information sourcing, transformation and quality assurance.



2. Create Traffic-Friendly SKUs Sooner: Search engine optimization (SEO) shouldn’t be an afterthought, and retailers need to incorporate this during the onboarding process. Very often retailers first focus on onboarding online and then make the product pages SEO-friendly over time as they evaluate data to see which products are doing well or not. In other cases, the focus is primarily on making the products for a few popular brands traffic-friendly at the onset. While that is reasonable, content analytics now allow retailers to be more responsive and compress the time to trigger decisions in terms of which SKUs need earlier investment from an SEO standpoint.



3. Invest in Scalable Quality Assurance for Content: Retailers need to identify product content gaps that can impede conversion, especially for key value items and key categories. Gaps in product content can impede the conversion process and also create a poor shopping experience. For key value items and specific categories, retailers need to invest in robust and scalable quality assurance solutions to help audit quality lapses and take quick corrective action.



4. Plan for Mobile Product Content: Mobile devices drive more and more Web traffic, but many retailers use the same product content for mobile devices and the desktop. Mobile devices drove more than 40% of Web traffic in the most recent Cyber Monday. This trend is likely to continue, but retailers are lagging behind as their product content for mobile devices are merely replicas of what they are showing on the desktop. The uses and the ways shoppers like to access content on the Web and mobile devices are quite different, and retailers need to tailor content according to the device. Responsive design can help improve the experience to some extent, but a serious look at the actual content is necessary.



5. Choose the Right Partner to Support Set-Up and Content Enrichment: Item set-up online is getting more complex with a cycle of pressing deadlines and new required skills, and there are many moving parts. Choosing the right partner can be a vital decision between playing and playing to win.



With 2016 holiday planning well underway, it will be critical for retailers to not only upload large amounts of new SKUs quickly, they’ll also need to rapidly onboard rich product content that creates a differentiated and engaging experience or lose their competitive edge in the long run.