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In our first Expert Talk, Bernhard Bicher spoke with Sebastian Klumpp, CEO of XPLN, about the biggest and most pressing challenges in retail. Various types of data, such as prices, product data, and customer reviews, play a central role in solving these challenges.
Originally known on the market as PriceIntelligence, Sebastian Klumpp quickly realized that the challenges in retail were not limited to prices. Even back then, the data that was collected revealed a great deal about a wide variety of issues. Every day, sometimes even every hour, the price development of millions of items worldwide was monitored on various channels and the data points were collected. Not only prices were stored, but also all associated product data, such as images of the items, information on categories, texts, and titles.
A detailed analysis of this data not only helps retailers develop a coherent pricing strategy across different channels, but also assists with issues such as digital shelf, transformation, and positioning. Based on these considerations, not only was the offering strategically developed, but a company name was also sought that encompassed more than just a focus on pricing. Thus, PriceIntelligence became XPLN.
Digital shelf, digitization, and pricing as hygiene factors
The e-commerce sector has already experienced and survived several upheavals. Today’s market, which is characterized by high customer expectations, marketplace and omnichannel business models, needs structured and analyzable data more than ever. Major challenges, such as digitization and, above all, process automation, can only be solved with the right database and the right data quality.
One area where structured data collection plays an important role is the digital shelf. This term encompasses the collection of various and rapidly evolving digital touchpoints that customers use to engage with brands and discover, research, and purchase products. So how can brands and retailers position themselves correctly to get people interested in their products, compare them, buy them, and rate them?
What used to be primarily a concern for retailers is now becoming increasingly important for brands as well. This is because brands themselves also sell or want to sell. This clearly shows that there is cut-throat competition on both sides of e-commerce: both retailers and brands must try to remain relevant in the market by making various adjustments. For retailers and brands, staying relevant means looking at how popular and trusted the company or brand is with end customers and how they can differentiate themselves from other companies. An important factor here is pricing, which must be right. However, it is not only the pricing strategy that must be competitive with that of competitors; other differentiating features must also be taken into account.
The perfect product portfolio as investment security
Here, too, an unstoppable trend is emerging: retailers want to list more and more products for sale online and thus further expand their own product range. However, this trend also has its pitfalls, as the effort involved in curating product ranges can be very high because a wide variety of suppliers are involved and too many processes are still based on manual data preparation and maintenance. Here, too, there is a trade-off: on the one hand, the pressure to expand the product range is enormous, but on the other hand, customers want to find the items they want quickly. So how should product data models be designed so that the filter options are sophisticated enough to provide a very good user experience, while still allowing as many products as possible to be represented in the same model?
Ultimately, investing in better product data for analysis, but also at the operational level, is the only way to not only survive in this highly competitive market, but to be truly successful. We would like to thank Sebastian Klumpp for the exciting conversation and stimulating exchange. It has been shown time and again that those who invest in customer experience must also invest in product experience.
But why is this still being neglected? We will discuss this with our next expert, Tobias Schlotter, VP Channel & Alliances EMEA at Akeneo. We look forward to welcoming you to the next Expert Talk.