As an online merchant, you are always looking for the next opportunity to grow. The prospect of launching on a new marketplace is exciting—it promises access to millions of new customers, expanded brand visibility, and a significant boost to revenue. The desire to scale quickly is powerful, and the process seems straightforward: connect your product data and start selling. However, this multichannel approach comes with a hidden complexity that can significantly slow you down: product data compliance.
Merchants often find themselves in a constant battle against rigid and unique data format requirements. You might have spent time crafting and curating a perfectly maintained product catalog, but as soon as you try to list on a new platform, your data is rejected. This cycle of rejection, delisting, and tedious manual correction is a common and frustrating reality for many.
The e-commerce landscapes sees growing fragmentation with marketplaces being launched in a frequency never seen before. Every marketplace offers unique benefits, but operates under its own set of rules.
Product information accepted on one platform may be rejected on another. These differences are often found in seemingly minor details that can have major consequences for your listings:
Character limits and HTML tags: A product title that works on Amazon (up to 200 characters) might be too long for OTTO Market. While formatting product descriptions with HTML tags can be useful on platforms like eBay, it is often not accepted on others.
Attribute formats and accepted values: Marketplaces like OTTO Market and Zalando use strict, predefined lists for attributes such as Color , Material, and Size. If you list a product color as "Ocean Blue," but the marketplace's accepted value is only "Blue," your listing will fail validation. This is a common issue that requires precise data formatting.
Weight and dimension Units: While you store the units of your product formatted "Centimeters”, and “Kilograms”, a marketplace may expect the value to be “CM” and “kg”, leading to data errors that block the listing.
This process creates a constant, repetitive workflow of manual data correction and is painfully slow: investigate the error logs, manually correct each value in a spreadsheet for a specific marketplace, and then re-upload—only to face potential new errors. This vicious cycle is a significant roadblock, rendering the dream of launching on new marketplaces quickly a operational nightmare.
This is where a centralized Product Information Management (PIM) system becomes indispensable. A PIM acts as the single source of truth for all your product data. By centralizing your information, you can manage, enrich, and maintain all product details in one place, from descriptions and images to technical specifications. From here, you can seamlessly keep your product data synchronized across all sales channels.
However, a PIM is only half the solution. The true power of a PIM lies in its ability to centralize data and tailor it to meet specific sales channel requirements. The capability to transform content before it is exported is crucial for efficient multichannel commerce. It's the difference between a unified data source and a data source that can actually speak the language of every marketplace.
At PlentyONE, we make these complexities the center of our attention. That's why we are excited to introduce our new feature: Functions.
Functions give you the power to flexibly manipulate your product data with a set of powerful, Excel-like formulas. Seamlessly integrated into your existing PlentyONE workflows, Functions allow you to:
Standardize data from your imports to meet internal PIM requirements.
Transform data with precision before exporting it to any marketplace.
Ensure compliance by converting values to match specific channel formats and vocabularies.
With Functions, you no longer have to resort to manual, tedious data correction. You can now use a formula to automatically convert "Ozeanblau" to "Blau," transform weight units, or truncate product titles to meet specific character limits. This automation saves immense time and resources, allowing you to focus on strategy and growth instead of data headaches.
PlentyONE's new Functions feature is the formula for flawless listings and confident multichannel expansion. Simplify your workflow, eliminate costly errors, and ensure your products are always ready for market.