Efficiency, Quality, and Scalability: Why Product Data Onboarding is Becoming Increasingly Important

How can products be efficiently created in a high-quality manner that is both customer- and search engine-friendly?

The PCP.COM Group has been active in online retail since 1998. Today, the PCP.COM Group is one of Switzerland’s leading multichannel providers of computers and home electronics. The group includes the brands STEG Electronics AG, which operates both an online store and 17 specialist retail outlets, and the technology online store techmania.ch.

In order to survive in this competitive market, which is characterized by very large international players and high margin pressure, PCP.COM relies on a broad product range that is always up to date and of high quality.

Keeping the product range up to date is a key element in the electronics market. This is another reason why sustainable success can only be achieved if a large number of high-quality products from a wide range of areas can be offered at competitive prices. But how can a medium-sized company offer a wide range of products with the desired e-commerce quality quickly and automatically?

From online shopping pioneer to leading multichannel provider

When the PCP.COM Group launched its first online shop in 1998, it was among the first to invest in an e-commerce structure instead of expanding its brick-and-mortar retail business, thus becoming a just-in-time specialist. For a long time, the approximately 15,000 products on offer could be maintained manually using a proprietary PIM system, thus ensuring high quality.

With the acquisition of additional brands and the continuous development of the product range, the effort involved in manually maintaining the range became too great. PCP.COM therefore developed its own onboarding solution, which consisted of the core data from suppliers and additional content from the content provider CNET. Within a short period of time, approximately 100,000 offers of varying quality were added to the existing 15,000 offers. The quality varied mainly because the content was not always available and subsequent improvements and additions to the content could not be taken into account.

In order to further expand its broad product range and restore the quality of the offerings described to the high level that had previously been achieved through manual maintenance, PCP.COM relied on Onedot’s product data onboarding solution. Unlike PCP.COM’s in-house development, this solution can automatically enrich data and take into account content added retrospectively, as the automation process is repeated regularly. This means that the data on the products offered in the online shop is regularly updated, which in turn contributes to a very good shopping experience.

Achieve higher quality with Onedot thanks to automation and data enrichment

The winner is whoever can offer products online faster. To ensure that products can be put online quickly, PCP.COM uses the core data from the price entry and content data from the supplier, which is then enriched with additional data from a pure content provider. This process is repeated regularly, as certain data is sometimes not yet available or subject to change.

Thanks to Onedot, the desired e-commerce quality can be guaranteed across a broad and deep product range. Although certain niche ranges or exclusive products are still maintained manually and will continue to be so in the future, PCP.COM uses Onedot software for all automated processes. This applies in particular to the ongoing expansion with new product groups and suppliers, but also to the automatic processing of additional attributes. This is the only way to achieve a significantly higher output and accurate results of a much higher quality.