The Content Challenge
Taking a website and populating it with rich, dynamic, and normalized content is often easier said than done.
BY ANNA WELLS
Making a website is, by all accounts, the easy part. It’s the task of populating the website with rich product content hat causes businesses to pause and reflect upon the
requirements. What amount of resources are necessary, and who
is responsible? How can online product content co-exist with other
sales channels, like a print catalog?
According to a recent white paper by hybris software (an SAP
company), organizations want to present their brands online
engagingly and consistently across all channels. They want to offer
a superior shopping experience by offering customers exactly
the products they are searching for. “To do all this,” the report
says, “they need a flexible, integrated e-commerce and content
management solution that offers compatibility and efficient data
transfer between the functions.”
Setting a Realistic Scope
Easier said than done, right? Anecdotally, distributors have told us
that the idea of populating their e-commerce sites with product
data is one of the most challenging aspects, and some consider it
a hurdle to taking the next step towards highly functional e-commerce. This is something Linda Taddonio, co-founder and e-commerce strategy office for Insite Software, a company well embedded in e-commerce solutions for distributors, sees quite often.
“It’s definitely near the top of the list of challenges for every
distributor,” Taddonio says. One of the biggest points of conten-
tion, it seems, is around who should be responsible for developing
this content — the manufacturers or the distributors. “But that
wall is starting to come down. I think both sides are starting to see
it’s in their best interests, no matter what. Because there is more
and more research, and now Deloitte is saying that 90 percent of
us start our search for products online. And it’s been coming out
in the research that you have to have the content.”
Taddonio says the biggest issue her company sees for distrib-
utors is in recognizing that organizational resources need to be
allocated towards the process of acquiring and managing content
on a longer- term basis, and that this isn’t just a one-and-done
that distributors can solely rely on their suppliers for. “We are
seeing more manufacturers syndicating their content, but even
then — once it gets to a distributor from a variety of manufactur-
ers, they’re still going to need to normalize it so it looks consistent
with what they’re presenting,” she explains. For example, if con-
tent is submitted in all capital letters but the style does not match
the distributor’s website, it needs to be stylized in a consistent
way in-house. “Likewise, attributes inside of one product category
have to be similarly assigned. So even if distributors were able to
get all of their content from other sources, they are still going to
need resources in order to normalize it for how they’re presenting
it.”
Getting Off the Ground
According to Mike Nagrant, principal consultant, Codifyd – a
provider of strategies that optimize the end-to-end product content lifecycle – many businesses are concerned about the costs of
integrating and maintaining this content and it becomes a chicken
and egg dilemma. “You don’t have the revenues because you haven’t made the investment in e-commerce development, so you’re
afraid of the cost of maintenance and continual build over time.
However, if you don’t make the investment, you’re never going to
get the revenue,” says Nagrant.
“But we know that if you make those investments, the revenue
will come. And treating that e-commerce investment with the
same kind of maintenance that you reserve for the rest of your
