Expert Talk: Competitive E-Commerce Automation

Seamless communication with customers is key in e-commerce, whether through videos, customized offers, blog articles, or social media. All channels must be used correctly to create the most comprehensive shopping experience possible. For this to work, however, one thing is essential: high-quality product data.

In Expert Talk, Prof. Dr. Darius Zumstein, Professor of Digital Marketing at the FHNW, explains what competitive e-commerce automation means and why companies that want to use artificial intelligence should focus on product data management to make downstream processes easier to implement. One example of this is the creation of automated product texts. These are central to the purchase decision and therefore have a direct influence on sales.

What makes competitive e-commerce automation?

Central to considerations regarding automation options in the e-commerce sector is a robust, lean, and future-oriented IT infrastructure that avoids the formation of various data silos as much as possible. Only when all teams and managers know where the data is can it be processed in the appropriate ways and made available for different use cases. In addition to the IT infrastructure, companies need to be clear about what their own customers expect and want from them. Omnichannel approaches with long-tail opportunities have a clear advantage here. Basically, only those who maintain an overview and communicate in a focused manner can make a difference in the face of strong competition.

The effects of incorrect product data have far-reaching consequences. For example, products cannot be displayed in the shop because too much information is missing, which in turn has a negative impact on the shopping experience. But it’s not just online stores that need to be able to access high-quality, e-commerce-ready data; marketing and sales efforts also rely heavily on accurate data. This includes newsletters, Google Ads, Instagram, and Facebook Ads with the right product information. The most competitive players are those who can leverage a wide variety of channels with the right data at the right time for the right person.

In order to manage the huge amount of product data from a wide variety of systems and sources, companies need sophisticated automation processes. These begin with the creation of articles and must then be thought through and automated as far as possible along the customer journey to the after-sales process. To achieve this, companies can rely on automation and artificial intelligence at various touchpoints. Today, AI applications are used in the areas of product data preparation and enrichment, the creation of product texts, and playback on various platforms. Artificial intelligence can offer real added value in all these areas. Companies must act now and make the foundation for e-commerce, marketing, and sales automation fit for the future. We are, of course, talking about product data.