How suppliers can enrich your product data

Expert talk

How suppliers can enrich your product data

Online sales are continuously increasing, which pushes companies to provide more information faster. Customers have more options to get that one product that they desire, so they will start comparing different websites to find the best overall product experience. Find out in this article how your suppliers can contribute to this product experience.

As stated in the introduction, customers are looking for the best customer experience. This includes complete, up-to-date product information and media assets, which allow them to make the best and knowledgeable choice.

Often companies already try to involve their suppliers or vendors into the enrichment process, but a majority of the time gathering information is a time-consuming and tedious process that puts pressure on the relationship between suppliers and retailers.

To ease this process several Product Information (PIM) and Master Data Management (MDM) solutions provide a Supplier Portal which allows your company to offer customers the information they desire. The portals allow suppliers of any size to add or update data directly into a system, without sending an unlimited amount of Excel sheets up and down. Basically, there will only be one single point of communication between the suppliers and retailers, which improves their relationships.

To improve the experience even more, some PIM solutions even provide a way to validate product information before it is send to your company, which means that you will not have to deal with information that is not accurately provided according to company standards. Ranging from simple to complex solutions, these validations can contain everything from a simple datatype check to an entire review and approval process.

Benefits of Supplier Portals

Faster enrichment process

Thousands or millions of products are quickly added to the assortment because they are delivered by their suppliers in a correct format. Your company does not need to worry about the enrichment of all these products, because the majority of information is already being provided by your suppliers.

Improve Data Quality

Built-in validation rules make sure that data provided by suppliers meets the required standards even before it is uploaded into your data management solution. This means that you will have less work checking the data and have more time to improve your general data quality.

Single source of supplier data

Supplier portals provide a single source of all your supplier data, which means that you do not have to search for all those separate spreadsheets, pdfs, e-mails… It is easier to maintain an overview of which information is already present and which you still have to provide.

Cost savings

Gathering new or updated information for your products is often a tedious and inefficient task. It involves several employees requesting data from suppliers via phone, mail or other channels, which results in inaccurate, incomplete and inconsistent data that requires more work before it can be published.

Improve Supplier-Retailer relationships

Supplier Portals enable better communication between suppliers and retailers and allow increasing efficiency, improve data quality and enhance time-to-market. Having a single channel for supplier data allows your company to provide data that meet the customer’s requirements.