Why rich content is the new competitive advantage in e-commerce

Today’s ecommerce brands face an increasing number of challenges when it comes to standing out in the marketplace. At the forefront of all these challenges is the question of whether a brand is delivering great customer experiences through its rich content.

Whether a business can achieve this or not comes down to the quality of their product content.

Rich content in particular can act as a powerful differentiator for remaining competitive. What’s more, AI-assisted rich content optimization has recently been highlighted in the 2025 Gartner Market Guide for PIM Solutions as an important feature that adds significant value to product information.

In this blog, we’ll look at why rich content has become so critical for ecommerce businesses — and what they should keep in mind when looking to implement it.

• What is rich content?
• Why is rich content so important? And how can it give brands a competitive edge?
• Creating rich content: What ecommerce brands need to consider
• Managing and maintaining rich content: What ecommerce brands need to consider
• Final thoughts

What is rich content?

In the context of product information, rich content assets help bring products to life due to their innate ability to interact with and engage consumers. Using a variety of rich content assets can add instant visual appeal to a product page while helping to guide and inform a customer’s shopping experience.

In essence, it can help customers gain a more comprehensive understanding of the product they’re considering buying.

Examples of rich content include:

• Product demonstration videos and ‘shoppable’ videos
• Interactive 360-degree images
• Interactive product configurators
• Augmented Reality (AR) and Virtual Reality (VR) experiences
• Detailed technical specifications
• User-generated content, like product reviews and customer Q&As

Why is rich content so important? And how can it give brands a competitive edge?

The use of rich content matters in the ecommerce industry for several reasons.

Utilizing rich content as part of your product marketing strategy can:

• Increase the likelihood of products being discovered in search engines – With search engines continuing to prioritize the most relevant, accurate, and helpful content for users, rich content can be harnessed to help brands meet SEO criteria to achieve higher search engine rankings. This can result in more visibility for products and higher levels of organic traffic to a branded sales channel.
• Foster better customer engagement – Consumers demand digital shopping experiences that surpass text-based browsing. They want to visualize how a product looks and works before they make a purchase. Rich content helps brands meet these expectations.
• Help boost conversion rates – One of the benefits of incorporating product content into your product listings is that it can help reassure a potential customer and answer certain questions they might have had in mind. For example, a video showing how a product can be used can connect a browsing shopper to that product — and when someone is truly convinced that the item they’re buying is going to meet their expectations, this often translates into a sale.
• Improve brand perception – Products that are presented well, with the aid of rich content assets like video and product configurators, can help boost levels of customer trust and loyalty.
• Reduce customer return rates – The cost of customer returns can make a large dent in a business’s revenue. They often occur because a customer receives a product that is, in some way, not what they originally expected. Providing visually rich, informative content upfront helps manage those expectations, and in turn, can reduce the volume of customer returns.

Creating rich content: What ecommerce brands need to consider

The level of investment and time a brand commits to creating rich content for its products is extremely important. With the ecommerce industry now heavily experience-driven, ‘content quality’ matters more than ever.

Producing low-quality content can not only deter potential customers and hurt sales, but it can negatively impact how your brand is perceived.

By contrast, committing to the creation of high-quality, rich content will likely have the opposite effect; helping your brand to build more trust and loyalty with customers — while boosting sales.

This is because high-quality, rich content allows brands to deliver more immersive, engaging buying experiences to the consumer. For example:

• 360-degree views can help potential customers explore and understand your products more easily
• Augmented Reality (commonly, with the help of a mobile device) can help potential customers visualize how your product may look when it is placed, for example, in a particular room in the house.
• Product demo videos can highlight key features while also addressing the most frequently asked customer questions.

Rich content helps brands to stand out in the marketplace by effectively conveying the value and quality of their products.

Managing and maintaining rich content: What ecommerce brands need to consider

Beyond the financial and resource investment needed to create this type of content, businesses must also decide on a robust way of storing, managing, and maintaining their rich content assets. This is where a Product Information Management (PIM) solution can make a huge difference, as it can take care of all of these aspects — and much more.

Gartner’s 2025 Market Guide for PIM Solutions recognizes that while all PIM systems can support image and video asset management, as well as rich product content authoring, only some have evolved to offer AI-powered capabilities. AI-assisted rich content optimization via a PIM helps brands enhance, personalize, and distribute product content at scale.

For instance, managing the distribution of rich content for products across multiple marketplaces can be a real challenge — but an AI-driven PIM can help by automating the formatting of content, so it meets each marketplace’s requirements. It can also ensure that there’s complete compliance with any platform-specific design specifications and character limits.

Final thoughts

Rich content is undoubtedly a powerful tool for product marketing, but it’s best leveraged through a PIM solution like inriver PIM.

As Gartner acknowledges in its recent PIM market guide, PIM systems need to be equipped to support rich content assets like 3D models, high-resolution videos, and interactive content like 360-degree views so that brands can deliver the best ecommerce experiences to customers and meet their expectations.

With in-built features like inriver Enrich, and an ability to harness AI to elevate customer experiences across every channel, inriver’s market-leading PIM solution can power personalized, data-driven experiences that ultimately drive better buyer journeys and limitless business growth.