Product Syndication: what it is and how it works
In the omnichannel era, Product Syndication is a key ally in customer experience and time to market. In this article we analyze what it is and how it works.
What is meant by Product Syndication
Product Content Syndication (PCS acronym) or more briefly Product Syndication is the term for the automated digital flow by which a company distributes quality media and product information to marketing and sales channels.
The goal of Product Content Syndication.
The Product Content Syndication process – supported by Product eXperience Management software such as SeeCommerce – enables automatic PDP and PLP updates of catalogs on the brand’s various touchpoints.
Benefits offered by Product Syndication
Automatic propagation of content and data is invaluable in reducing the manual work of updating product catalogs, shortening the time to market significantly, especially in cases of large assortments with frequent rotations.
The benefits also affect the CX: as we will see shortly, thanks to dynamic transformations, image and video attributes are automatically adapted to the various touchpoints, ensuring that each user always has an optimal multi-channel experience.
A transformation that, in turn, is also reflected in the overall SEO performance and Web Core Vitals performance of websites and e-commerce.
The Role of PXM Software in Product Syndication
Geared toward the catalogs of the various touchpoints, Product Syndication is primarily concerned with two souls of the company’s assets: data and product content.
That’s why a PXM software is the perfect solution to support this process; unlike PIM and DAM, in fact, a Product eXperience Management tool allows product information and media to be governed from a single solution, simplifying the IT stack.
The following are the main features of a PXM software to support Product Syndication.
Media & data ingestion
Centralization of multimedia content and catalog-related information is the first step preparatory to Product Syndication.
SeeCommerce, for example, thanks to easy-to-implement APIs, dialogues effectively with tools such as ERP, MDM and PLM, and supports massive imports of all file and data formats.
Naming convention
PXM software with naming convention capabilities marks a marked difference from the traditional “silo” approach of Digital Asset Management and Product Information Management software.
Once the information assets have been centralized, in fact, the naming convention automatically associates each media content with all the data related to the products it represents.
SeeCommerce, for example, based on configurable rules and nomenclature, reads the file name and recognizes the product with which the media is associated automatically, cutting down on manual work.
Data quality & data transformation
Again on the basis of configurable rules, moreover, PXM software transforms centralized information, enriching a product without the need for any manual activity.
For example, from the product code, SeeCommerce can infer numerous pieces of information such as color, size, country of origin of production, avoiding the need for them to be entered through time-consuming data-entry necessary for data quality and data transformation.
Automatic look generation
Product Syndication can-in fact, should-be much more than just a cascading flow of data and media to end channels. The best PXMs, including SeeCommerce, allow the creation of looks or bundles to be made automatic, which is very useful in industries such as fashion, food and manufacturing.
Based on one or more attributes, our Product eXperience Manager automatically generates valuable product combinations to suggest one or more related items to customers on the various touchpoints, favoring up and cross-selling.
Automatic categorization of products
One of the most appreciated features of SeeCommerce, again from a Product Syndication perspective, relates to automatic categorization of products.
Based on a product’s attributes and flexible rules, our PXM associates each item with different categories within brand portals, e-shops, and marketplaces where the brand is present, resulting in catalogs that are automatically differentiated by touchpoint.
Product Feed Management & Media Delivery
In a nutshell, Product Syndication consists of two flows that, in the PXM-type approach, are closely connected: the Product Feed Management & Product Media Delivery.
SeeCommerce, in particular, has fast and easy-to-implement APIs that ensure consistent and effective propagation of content, from upstream to downstream, made particularly performant by the CDN and Dynamic Media Transformation features.
Content Delivery Network
SeeCommerce leverages Amazon’s content delivery network (AWS CloudFront) to propagate photos and videos of all formats at peak performance, regardless of the traffic peaks of a Web touchpoint and the geographic location from which users browse.
Dynamic Media Transformation
Last but not least, another crucial SeeCommerce feature from a Product Syndication perspective is Dynamic Media Transformation.
In fact, our platform dynamically adapts various image or clip attributes-such as format, size, aspect ratio, or background color, cutting down on the manual work otherwise required to optimize each digital asset against the specific requirements of individual channels.
How about seeing Product Syndication at work?
If you’d like to learn more about all the features and potential of data and product media syndication, as well as discover best practices for your industry of choice, click on the button below-we’ll set up a short demo to answer all your curiosities!
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