7 ways to improve the performance of your product listings

1. Add enhanced visual content 

Words are great, but a picture tells a thousand words. High-quality, well-produced images and videos can communicate far more about your products while. adding an extra layer of excitement on every digital shelf.  

One potential challenge of managing these valuable assets is ensuring you have the right systems in place to successfully deliver images and video content to your digital shelf. Typically, Digital Asset Management (DAM) software acts as a central hub for all your digital assets. However, by integrating the right DAM and Product Information Management (PIM) systems together, you can deliver digital assets to your online channels that are complemented by the market-ready product information that ensure these assets are always telling the right story. 

2. Monitor product information accuracy 

If your product information is accurate or incomplete, you run the risk of unhappy customers at best, and a missed sale at worst. Accurate product information is the lifeblood of any successful product listing page.  

The need for accurate and complete product information is not only felt by the customer, either. With new and increasingly complex product-related regulations, such as the European Union’s Digital Product Passport initiative, accurate product information is no longer a nice-to-have, it’s a business-critical need. Only with the right PIM platform in place can you improve your product listings and be sure they are displaying the correct information.  

However, getting this accurate information out across your digital shelf is only part of the challenge. Maintaining this accuracy is also key. This is possible with Digital Shelf Analytics (DSA) technology, a software solution that monitors all your digital shelf touchpoints and sends you real-time, actionable insight should the information on any of your product listing pages become corrupted or incomplete. That way, you can always keep your PLPs optimized for conversions. 

3. Maintain channel consistency 

In today’s omnichannel shopping environment, buyers are seeing your products on more channels than ever before. These non-linear buying journeys mean you need to be telling the same product story across all owned and third-party channels, whether marketplaces, resellers, social channels, and even in-store. Failing to have a consistent story across all these touchpoints will leave potential customers confused and more likely to go with the competition. 

Ensuring this channel consistency is key if you want to improve product listings, and is another important benefit of having an advanced PIM solution at the heart of your tech stack. An advanced PIM with built-in syndication capabilities empowers you to robustly manage the consistency of all your online channels in minutes, not hours. Need to change one piece of information? Simply update your product listings in the PIM’s centralized dashboard and with the press of a button your product listing pages are automatically across all your channels. 

4. Develop a strong SEO strategy 

In a crowded market, if nobody can find your products then nobody will buy them. That’s why getting your SEO, or search engine optimization, strategy right is so important. A winning SEO strategy is often overlooked by brands selling online, despite being an essential part of any successful digital shelf strategy. For example, turning the key features of your product into benefit-focused, SEO-optimized product descriptions is the best way to ensure your products are seen.  

However, for many marketers SEO remains somewhat of a time-consuming mystery. But it doesn’t have to be this way. With an advanced PIM as your foundation, you can enjoy the AI-powered content creation capabilities that tailor the SEO potential of your product listing pages to the expectations of channel, market, and customer – and all within a matter of minutes. This gives you a huge advantage over the competition, and ensures your products are always findable by potential customers. 

5. Integrate immersive elements 

Want to take your digital asset strategy to the next level? Then why not explore how immersive elements can help your PLPs pop on every channel? The era of immersive shopping is already here, and leading brands are already giving their customers the interactive product experiences they expect. These immersive elements use Augmented Reality (AR) tools to place furniture in a customer’s home, or shoes or a customers’ feet, and can truly bring your products to life. 

Of course, these immersive elements require the right technology to make them possible. However, at the core of any immersive experience sits complete and correct product information fed by an advanced PIM solution. Without accurate information on dimensions, materials, colors, and more, these immersive elements aren’t reliable and could leave your customers frustrated and making a costly product return.  

6. Understand how products perform 

Beyond monitoring product information accuracy, DSA technology allows you to monitor buyer behavior, product performance, and channel competition from a single, centralized dashboard. With DSA, you get real-time, actionable insights that you can use to optimize all your e-commerce touchpoints. This is a significant value-add for your marketing teams. It means they are no longer selling blind on the digital shelf, as they can response to each and every issue that arises. Thanks to an advanced PIM system with integrated DSA capabilities, your teams have the ultimate foundation for e-commerce success. 

7. Close the digital shelf loop

As is now clear, the digital shelf can be a tough selling environment if you don’t have the right tools at your disposal. Even with the best intentions and efforts in creating winning PLPs, those efforts can soon be in vain should information disappear or images distort while out on the digital shelf. That’s why so many successful e-commerce brands rely on the right software solution to “close-the-loop” on their online sales strategy. 

Only with an advanced PIM that has syndication and digital shelf analytics capabilities integrated can you successfully create enriched product stories, distribute them to all online touchpoints, monitor their performance data, and then react to ensure these listings remain optimized. Closing this data enrichment loop is key to any successful e-commerce strategy, and that’s only possible with the right technology platform in place. 

inriver: The complete solution for e-commerce success  

To stand out in a truly omnichannel world, you need to rely on the right product-related software. For a growing number of brands, manufacturers, and retailers, that software is the inriver platform. With an advanced PIM solution at its core and integrated syndication and digital shelf analytics capabilities, you have all the tools you need to improve product listings, elevate your e-commerce strategy, and win on the digital shelf.