Controlling & Maximising Your Product Data in a Multichannel World

In this multichannel world, we get very excited about being able to personalise our customers’ experiences, driven by programmatic and dynamic marketing and advertising. However, unless your product data is accurate and comprehensive and is available to all of your channels via a data feed that is flexible and simple to snap-in, you are unable to make the most of your multiple channels and the opportunities to take advantage of personalisation and other exciting marketing tools are lost. Controlling and maximising the product data in your multichannel software solution is key to achieving this. Here are some of the way in which Khaos Control can be used to help you improve your product data across the board:

1. Unlock the value of your existing data
   You undoubtedly have your product data in a number of different places. As your business has grown, maintaining that data on the various channels that you interact with has grown, but may well be something that you put up with ‘as the cost of doing business in that space’. Consolidating your data in Khaos Control and driving the product content on all of your channels from this central resource will allow you to:
   • reduce product content creation / maintenance time
   • leverage your existing product content
   • upload data to various channels and affiliates from a single source
   • ensure consistency of internal referencing – key when trying to link product data into stock availability

   In centralising your data it’s important to take into account the different requirements that each of the channels and / or affiliates you work with have with regards to their specific criteria. Khaos Control’s Amazon and Ebay feeds already allow you to build up your products as required, but working with a third party affiliate may lead to you needing to take advantage of Stock UDAs and other data elements to ensure that the affiliate has all of the information that they require. Our standardised and powerful XML feeds ensure that your product data can be easily exported and used by the third parties that you interact with and the implementation of our standard web service provides you with the ability to automate this process entirely.

2. Check, check and check again
   Proof-reading of product content and checking of specifications is dull work, but necessary. Once you’ve taken advantage of your multichannel software solution’s ability to store all your product data in single repository, you need to make sure that it’s right. Putting an internal process in place so that new and amended products are validated is key. Perhaps taking advantage of a Stock Option, Type orUDA to categorise products for approval and keep track of them during this process. Khaos Control’s Amazon and Ebaylisting tools already flag up validation errors to ensure that listings are not refused. Taking this another step further, you could also talk to our development team with regards to custom product validation to check up on missing images, attributes or other key data – if you’re working with a new affiliate or a process that’s specific to your company.

   Ensuring the high-quality of your data in Khaos Control will mean that you don’t hit any problems with regards to listing / marketing your products and they also provide you with learning opportunities where you can improve your channels and your overall customer experience.

3. Optimisation and the Dark Arts of SEO
   Making your products easily discoverable AND making them stand out against the competition is something that your multichannel marketers will be well-versed in. Short, snappy product titles can work well on your own website; where the customer has already bought into your brand and knows what they’re after. However, once you’re out in the choppier waters of the other channels and affiliates that you interact with your products have to stand on their own two feet and their titles have to morph accordingly. In these situations, including relevant detail in the product title / short description is vital. For example, bike retailers may want to include the frame material, type, size and brand as well the name of the product itself.

   Descriptions for products that you’re uploading to your channels should follow similar principles, but from the perspective of focusing on the keywords that are vital to your business and the information that your customers want and / or need to know. However, this is something that you can work on over time, testing and developing your product descriptions as you go in order to keep up with your own constantly evolving requirements, and those of your customers and affiliates – not to mention Google.

   Khaos Control provides two ways of tackling this, which allow you to maintain and benefit from your centralised product data set, whilst customising your data where necessary:

   1. Channel specific listings – these allow you to create listings for products with channel-specific titles, descriptions and attributes – a great example of this is Ebay.
   2. Web Categories – separate web category structures for the different channels you sell across allow you to customise the following for every item you wish to list on a channel / affiliate:
   • Stock Code / SKU / Product Code
   • Short Description / Product Title
   • Web Teaser text
   • Long Description

   This ensures that you can mould your data to suit each specific market that you’re taking aim at. Khaos Control’s integrated sales order functionality also ensures that when importing orders from a channel that has unique SKUs or product titles defined the customer-facing documentation you produce (be it paperwork or email) reflects what the customer’s experienced on their channel, rather than your own defaults.

4. Empower your channels and affiliates
   Different channels will categorise the same product in completely different ways. For example, you may have the road bikes you sell categorised as Bikes –> Road Bikes, but an affiliate you deal with that is less targeted may well have Cycling –> Bikes –> Road Bikes. Re-categorising your products per channel is one of the things that Khaos Control’s Web Category functionality shines at. Combined with the XML feeds in our standard API your marketing partners have true flexibility when it comes to the data that you’re providing them with. For example, with Size Colour Style (SCS) attributes split out in the product feed, they can manipulate your data to their own ends (for example, where blue needs to become cobalt on their channel) whilst still retaining the original data feed from Khaos Control.

   The added bonus to using your data in the manner outlined above is that it won’t just please your marketing partners and the affiliates you work with, it will also ensure that there’s less chance of customers filtering your products out during their buying process. As eCommerce develops, customers expect marketing that is personalised and targeted, with accurate and relevant product data. Nailing that ensures the consistent experience that provides the best opportunity for your product to shine.

   And there’s no need to stop there. Empowering your marketing partners to create engaging ads and content that drive off the product and stock levels feeds from Khaos Control’s standard web service put you in a position where website and application ads and apps can contain live inventory figures and provide interactive search facilities for potential customers. Providing your creatives with the data and technology that allows their ideas to take flight is key to any multichannel software solution and Khaos Control delivers in this regard.

I hope that the above has given you some ideas on how to get the most out of your product data in Khaos Control, existing Khaos Control customers can take advantage of our online Wiki and our in-houseTraining and Consultancy services. As you have undoubtedly already grasped, simply housing all of your data centrally is only a piece of the puzzle, taking advantage of that data so that you can optimise all of your channels is vital to ensuring a consistently excellent experience for your customers and continued sales growth for your business.

If you’re not yet a Khaos Control customer and the chaos in your multichannel business could benefit from being controlled, contact ourSales team, they’ll be delighted to discuss your challenges and problems with you and introduce you to the power of Khaos Control.