With reports suggesting that year to date, the UK e-retail market has grown 14%* and that the average household spending has reached almost £1000 per year online**, many marketing agencies could be missing a trick by failing to maximise how visible their clients’ products are online.
The market is now flooded with price comparison and product listing sites but we are finding that many of the listings don’t have the correct price or stock availability, which can be damaging for the brand when they fail to deliver what the customer is expecting. Couple this with the fact that sites like Amazon have a very strict policy when it comes to listings and protecting their customer’s experience, brands could be putting themselves in a very vulnerable position if their product feeds aren’t kept up to date.
Automated ‘intelligent’ product display feeds are proven to save retailers and agencies days or weeks of management and development time to set up and maintain listings on product comparison sites and help get products in front of more online shoppers quickly and effectively. For retailers and marketers alike, a failure to keep stock levels up to date online is something which can cost retailers dearly when it comes to reputation and credibility. It is also one of the key areas that marketing agencies already offering product feed services tend to fall down on.
The problem I often find in my line of work is that many retailers had the information available to update their product feeds, but simply didn’t have the ‘thing’ that could feed this information out to the web and where it needed to go. Often, I find that marketing agencies are none the wiser either.
Logan Tod’s Annual Online Shopping Index has revealed that the public intend to do 23 per cent more shopping online in the run up to Christmas 2010. Stock availability will be a critical issue for many retailers over this period and so agencies need to take note. Providing their customers with an outsourced solution like Feed Manager will ensure marketing agencies can help their clients get their listing processes in order now so that their online product display matches the real picture in the warehouse and that customers are not left disappointed.
*http://www.internetretailing.net/2010/06/growth-in-online-shopping-at-its-fastest-for-two-years/