Blog
November 27, 2023
The Connected Commerce Insider event series at dieCuisine in Zurich Altstetten aimed to highlight ways to achieve success in digital marketplaces and bring experts together. Attendees were able to gain exciting insights from four presentations by established marketplace experts, which were followed by lively discussions. First, Bernhard Egger, Managing Director of HANDELSVERBAND.swiss, spoke about how online and offline purchasing behavior in Switzerland has changed in recent years. One trend is clear: customer behavior is becoming increasingly hybrid. But what does that mean?
Omnichannel and marketplace models are essential
Today, retailers need to adopt a business strategy that aims to provide a seamless, cross-channel shopping experience that integrates online and offline. This mix must be tailored to the company and may or may not include connection and distribution to one or more marketplaces. An important alternative mentioned in this context was the growing importance of social commerce. Social commerce involves the sale of products or services on social media.
To ensure a successful customer experience, companies today must offer their customers a wide variety of touchpoints, which only works with targeted investments. This was demonstrated in presentations by Stefan Lanz, Head of Digitalization at gebana AG, and Beat Stoller, Head of Partnerships at haar-shop.ch AG. For both companies, an inspiring and motivating online shopping experience is key. The gamification aspects of the haar-shop.ch online shop experience were particularly well received: hair colors can be tested immediately using a mobile phone camera. To ensure that this always works smoothly, the correct product data must always be up to date. This raises the question of how retailers can digitize sustainably, ensure that all products are always up to date in the online shop, and at the same time guarantee the quality of the product data.
Artificial intelligence in product data onboarding
At this point, automated product data onboarding has become indispensable for retailers. This was impressively demonstrated in the presentation by Ilario Musio, Head of E-Commerce at SportX & Bike World. With 54 stores across Switzerland and an online shop, it was clear to the well-known SportX brand that manual maintenance of PIM data was not scalable and therefore not sustainable for the future. They therefore decided to rely on the unique AI-supported Onedot product data platform, which is the only one on the market to offer large-scale product data onboarding.
Today, the product data platform is used in such a way that Onedot maps the suppliers’ product catalogs to SportX’s product data structure and automatically feeds the processed data into SportX’s PIM. This has many different positive effects for SportX: a significant reduction in the error rate of product data and a reduction in repetitive work, a significant scaling of the online business through the targeted expansion of the online range, and a faster time-to-market cycle. As a result, SportX is significantly increasing its sales and can catch up with other providers.
Marketplaces continue to drive volume
The successful launch of the Connected Commerce Insider event series shows once again that many companies are grappling with issues surrounding marketplaces, digitalization, and automation and are looking for ways to respond to difficult considerations in the best possible way. This is another reason why the exchange among experts at the great location dieCuisine was so highly valued. We would like to thank our partner hmmh for organizing the event and are already looking forward to the next joint event.