by Sergii Shvets, CEO at Gepard
Today, one of the main trends in eCommerce is unified commerce beyond omnichannel. A multi-channel sales strategy involves offering products that are tailored to customer needs across different sales channels, such as marketplaces, and are often coordinated from a single platform. An example of such a platform is Mirakl, which made a technical consolidation of the marketplace market and allowed the building of clear rules of the game between its participants.
If you’re looking for a way to stimulate sales, enterprise marketplace development or grow your business to unprecedented heights, you should look to omnichannel and scale your B2B or B2C markets through the largest marketplaces. And if you’re going to succeed in a cut-throat industry like the retail sector it especially is paramount to pay attention to efficient data management. Two key solutions that have proven umpteen times their integration to be a game-changer for retailers are a Product Information Management (PIM) system and Mirakl – a fast-growing cloud-based platform that allows companies to launch and scale B2B or B2C marketplaces and connect with other third-party sellers in a variety of industries.
By connecting a PIM tool with Mirakl platform, bringing access to marketplaces, manufacturers can seamlessly expand the reach of their products by accessing and onboarding additional sellers in new markets. For retailers, the PIM-Mirakl connection presents an opportunity for selling goods on several platforms simultaneously using the same standart. The integration streamlines data management by ensuring accurate and consistent product details across all consumer touchpoints. But that’s not all. Here is an in-depth look into the capabilities of PIM and Mirakl connection and how this means endless growth opportunities in the feature.
The Power of Mirakl eCommerce Platform
Mirakl-powered Marketplaces gained 35% year-over-year in sales during last year’s global Cyber week. This is pretty impressive given that the overall eCommerce industry gained only 2% during the same event. From this trend, you can tell that your business holds immense growth potential by connecting to world biggest marketplaces through Mirakl platform.
Mirakl is making rapid steps to become a frontrunner in this space, attracting industry-leading brands like Carrefour, Astore by AccorHotels, ABB, Leroy Merlin, and Toyota Material Handling. The platform enables enterprise companies to accelerate growth with an easy-to-integrate, launch, and manage online marketplace. As a transactional marketplace, Mirakl allows third-party B2B or B2C merchants to:
- Offer a wide range of physical products and services
- Understand the needs of their buyers
- Optimize sales and revenue with higher profit margins
After set up, you can reach global sellers in any location and integrate any product volume in a matter of a few hours. The platform leverages cutting-edge APIs technology, allowing you to connect it with your current eCommerce ecosystem in a few steps.
Expanding your business reach by integrating with more sellers through Mirakl has various benefits. For instance, this approach gives you an opportunity to:
- Be experimental and increase sales
Mirakl integration allows you to experiment with new brands and products risk-free. With direct access to the platform’s robust ecosystem of pre-vetted partners and sellers, retailers can onboard as many third-party brands as they wish. This allows you to expand your product assortment for increased sales. Buyers will browse your marketplace and find everything they want, plus more. Even better, Mirakl is a turnkey platform and might help you realize business value within a year. The platform receives up to 1.6 billion API calls during peak seasons, such as Cyber Week.
- Offer complementary after-sale services
By connecting your business to a Mirakl-powered marketplace, you can complete the traditional buying experience by offering a complimentary after-sales service. Whether it’s weekend sports lessons, white goods installation, or in-person beauty services, the offering will go a long way in enhancing the buyer’s experience. And trusted insights show that 68% of shoppers will readily pay up to 15% more for the same commodity if assured of a stellar customer experience with the vendor. Moreover, impressing buyers with complementary after-sales services can lead to quality word-of-mouth referrals for your already enriched product assortment.
- Drive success across your company
Companies like Best Buy Canada and Conrad marketplace have successfully leveraged Mirakl to drive success across their entire organizations. “Mirakl is the key and the right partner because its technology is robust, scalable, and easy to integrate,” says Thierry Hay-Sabourin, Senior Vice President of eCommerce at Best Buy Canada. By launching and growing your B2B or B2C marketplace on the platform, everyone in the organization wins. For example, the merchandising department gets to drive sales at higher margins and forge stronger relationships with an expanded supplier database. At the same time, marketers get to analyze customer data and site activity to identify opportunities for capturing more inbound demand while the C-level team delivers revenue targets.
- Forge stronger customer relationships
As a seller with a marketplace on Mirakl, you can give your visitors the experience of an “endless aisle” where products are showcased alongside their alternative options with corresponding prices. This unique offering allows you to build stronger relationships with customers who will likely leave positive reviews about your marketplace. In the long haul, you get to build a loyal audience who prefer shopping from your store, thanks to endless variety.
While integrating with Mirakl allows retailers to expand their offerings by connecting with more sellers, this can also mean a big challenge in managing the increased product data. That said, here are the problems that you’ll likely encounter:
- High costs of maintaining and updating product details: Although the costs of managing and updating commodity details in online sales platforms vary with data volume, complexity, and store size, they can generally be high. This is because you have to factor in the costs of gathering, validating, and integrating details from multiple sources. Other costs include technology, tools, quality assurance, and infrastructure scaling expenses.
- Inefficient and time-intensive manual processes: Entering commodity details manually isn’t only inefficient but also labor-intensive and robs your team of time to focus on high-value roles, such as enhancing customer experience. And for team members with a lower concentration span, manual data entry shifts might mean quick boredom. This can lower productivity or attention to detail, resulting in inconsistent input and variations in commodity attributes like specs, titles, and descriptions.
- Data inconsistency: Online selling platforms aggregate commodity details from multiple vendors and suppliers, each with disparate data sources and formats. Typically, you’ll be dealing with sellers who use varying templates or data structures to provide their partners with commodity details. Coupled with the need for dynamic updates, this makes it difficult to enforce robust data validation rules for ensuring accuracy and consistency across the marketplace.
- Tracking and reporting costs: Online marketplaces are geared to deliver an omnichannel presence across mobile apps, social media pages, and other third-party platforms. This means you’ll need dedicated resources, such as content writers and data analysts, to manage product details across these channels. In the long haul, you’ll find it difficult to follow and report the costs of updating voluminous product details across multiple channels in real time, which can translate to a budget overrun.
The Benefits of Connecting PIM and Mirakl
If you want to harness endless business opportunities, you can avoid the prevalent challenges of managing commodity details by connecting your Mirakl-powered marketplace with a PIM solution. PIM is a cutting-edge eCommerce software that enables companies to seamlessly maintain and update product data and marketing content across all sales channels. Thanks to this competitive advantage, experts forecast the global PIM software market to peak at $15.83 billion by 2028.
A typical custom or premium PIM software comes with three key features that help you optimize product details management, including:
- Data consolidation: A PIM system features data consolidation capabilities, enabling you to centralize commodity details from multiple sources in a scalable repository. By creating a unified product database, you eliminate silos that would otherwise result in duplication of commodity details or inconsistency across sales channels.
- Data enrichment: PIM solutions come with data enrichment features that allow retailers to reveal more product details. For instance, you can enrich the commodity details with marketing content, technical specifications, dimensions, or certifications to provide users with as accurate and comprehensive details as possible. This doesn’t only optimize conversion rates but also improves the overall customer experience.
- Data synchronization: With automatic data synchronization capabilities, PIM software enables you to make changes to commodity details and update the same across multiple channels and platforms in real time. This seamless synchronization ensures that all buyers receive accurate and updated marketing content, regardless of the channel they engage your brand with.
Future Opportunities and Conclusion
There are exciting future opportunities and business prospects when you connect your Mirakl-powered marketplace with a PIM solution. For instance, you can implement advanced data analytics to combine the power of PIM commodity details and Mirakl transactional data for in-depth insights into market trends, commodity performance, or customer behavior. Such insights can be instrumental in making data-driven decisions when it comes to customer experience personalization, ultimately pushing your company to new heights.
Moreover, this connection opens doors for innovation, allowing you to try new technologies like AI for advanced data management. AI algorithms can process voluminous data sets to identify inconsistencies and streamline synchronization across all channels through automatic updates. With this advancement, your company can consolidate more product catalogs and process increased transaction volumes, ultimately growing exponentially.
