The E-Book on E-Commerce content
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The E-Book on E-Commerce content
Contents
1. About the Author
2. Understanding Consumer Shopping Behaviour & Why Brands
Should Invest in Digital Shelf
3. Crafting Compelling Product Names to Maximise Product
Search Visibility
4. Designing Product Visual Content & Digital Asset Standard
Guideline by Leveraging DAM
5. Building a Product Content Ecosystem for Your Digital Shelf
6. Where to Begin with E-Commerce in Product Content
Ecosystem | Top Tips
7. Closing Note
2
1. About the Author
Jing Wang, is the Principal Consultant of
Strategy & Implementation Practice with
ICP and responsible for overseeing and
leading Digital Shelf & MarTech consulting
engagements in EMEA & APAC regions.
Jing is a seasoned Digital Asset Management
consultant and product e-content subject
matter expertise. She has delivered a wide
range of enterprise-level E-Commerce product
content and digital shelf ecosystem integration
programmes for world-leading organisations
(FTSE 100 and S&P 500 companies).
3
2. Understanding Consumer Shopping
Behaviour and Why Brands Should
Invest in Digital Shelf
Shopping has
changed a lot
since the rise
Consumers are shifting to ROPO:
of the web.
While brands invest billions per year in physical Although the
shelf presence, consumers are turning to the web vast majority
to research, discover and purchase products, of purchases
throughout the day and across screens and remain offline
devices. In fact, 84% of smartphone shoppers and in-store,
turn to their mobile phone to help them shop digitising “the
while in a store. One-third of shoppers use their shelf” will soon
smartphone to find information instead of asking be an important
store employees (I personally do this myself). source of
Instead of using retail shelves, these constantly competitive
connected shoppers browse pages of products advantage.
online - the “Digital Shelf” - looking for answers to
their questions.
These consumers are known as ROPO (Research Online, Purchase Offline)
or reverse-ROPO shoppers. The latter, you’ve guessed it, is someone who
browses products in store before making their purchase online.
There are many reasons for ROPO shopping. The most common one is
related to needing time to make an informed decision and being able to
compare products more easily, then see the product first-hand before
committing to a purchase. For reverse ROPO, it occurs because while many
people still prefer to see, touch, or sometimes taste products in store,
many items are available at lower prices through online vendors. For both
ROPO and reverse ROPO shoppers, content online is an essential part of
their purchasing journey.
4
How do brands and retailers react to this?
Brands and retailers are going omnichannel to ensure they remain
relevant to the trend in shopping behaviour. Traditional brick-
and-mortar retailers are expanding their digital presence, while
pure-play retailers are deepening engagement with consumers by
opening physical stores.
Think of luxury brands, from Louis Vuitton to Chanel and Gucci,
who have been racing to embrace digital and are partnering
with multi-brand retailer sites like Farfetch, developing their own
platforms or both. Look at Wayfair, the home furnishing retailer,
as they follow other digital-native retailers that have entered
decades of operating exclusively online, opened its first brick-
and-mortar food stare “Amazon Go” in Dec 2016 in Seattle and
recently invested in its “4-Star” store in New York offering walk-in
customers the option to browse and buy items that are rated 4
stars or above on Amazon.com.
Thinking in terms of “Bricks” vs. “Clicks” is outdated; “Brick-and-
click” is the current and future retailer reality.
A strong digital presence has never been more critical:
It is not simply a case of investing your offline vs. online channel, it
is about making your online product content relevant and engaging
to drive sales for both physical and digital shelves.
Brands must have a strong digital presence, even if their products
are not suited for traditional Ecommerce. Hard luxury brands,
particularly in watches and jewellery, are still heavily reliant on
department stores and own boutiques and view Ecommerce as
the home of counterfeit goods and unauthorised “grey market”
sellers. The iconic watchmaker Patek Philippe’s online store, where
consumers can browse products via decent product images and
informative product information but won’t find an “Add to Cart”
button. The “only look but not purchase” experience is certainly
atypical of most shopping websites, but that makes sense in
specific circumstances and is an excellent example of how some
high-end retailers are dealing with a dilemma born of the digital
age and they know digital presence is crucial.
5
So where to start?
A tactical approach to start building
your digital shelf is to think about
the three main steps shoppers may
have when browsing your product
online.
1. Begin with search products on retailer sites to find what they are
looking for.
2. Instead of waiting to be sold to, they are actively looking for
information about the product and compare products across brands
to inform their purchases.
3. Once they have all the information, they turn to customer reviews to
help them finalise purchasing decision.
To meet shopper expectations, brands need to:
1. Be visible in the right places and have maximum search visibility on
retailer websites.
2. Inform shoppers about your product through compelling content
(including titles, photos, feature bullet points, descriptions and
enhanced content).
3. Nail the basics of rating and reviews by seeking out digital influencers
to provide a great deal of reach and positive impact to your brands.
Apart from that, you would also need a robust product content
ecosystem to effectively build and maintain your digital shelf scale.
6
3. Crafting Compelling Product
Names to Maximise Product
Search Visibility
Shoppers can’t buy what they can’t find. They predominantly buy
products that are displayed on the first page of search results. If your
product is not on page one, you are invisible online. Stats show that 84%
of “Add to Cart” comes the first three search positions. Items after #20
are neither seen nor purchased.
The fact is, your retailers own search for your brands, you don’t. And the
way retailers rank and place products on a search results page can vary
depending on the complexity of their own search algorithm. For brands,
winning at search means you must get best product content to your
e-retailers, you must start by having a compelling name.
What is product naming and why is it important?
As straightforward as it sounds, it’s the title or short description of
the product. It informs shoppers of the exact product type, size and
quantity they are purchasing. The naming should make the product
easily identifiable to shoppers on the search results page.
Product naming is one of the key components that heavily influence
e-retailers’ search algorithms, and it complements the primary product
image to inform shoppers from within the search results.
7
What makes a compelling product name?
• Title structure: this can vary slightly according to the product
category (e.g. health care, food/refreshment, home care, beauty/
personal care, etc.). Below is an example of recommended structure:
Brand Functional Benefits Variant Flavour Format Size
e.g. Pukka Herbs e.g. Chesty coughs e.g. organic e.g. Ginger e.g. syrup e.g. 100 ml
blend & Thyme bottle
Brand Sub Brand Flavour Variant Format Size/Weight
e.g. Honest Tea e.g. Honest sport e.g. orange e.g. sport drink e.g. 16.0 fl.oz.
bottle
Brand Variant Format Size/Count/Volume
e.g. Andrex e.g. skin kind, classic clean e.g. toilet roll, e.g. 54 rolls, 12 pack (total
tissue paper 480 wipes)
Brand Sub Brand Shade/Fragrance Type Format Size
e.g. L’Oreal e.g. L’Oreal e.g. Rose Tendre 303 e.g. Color Riche e.g. 7 ml
Lipstick 3.5g
• Length: the number of characters in the title matters so you must
place the absolute relevant keywords first (this has both practical and
algorithmic implications!).
• Title in organic results have between 115-144 characters depending on
the product category.
• Titles in right rail ads have around 30-33 characters.
• Titles in mobile ads have between 55-63 characters
• Word order: let’s say you have around 60 characters in a product
title which shows in search results, this puts more importance on
word order. Brands need to ensure the most relevant keywords (that a
shopper needs) are as close to the front of the title as possible. Ideally
right after the brand name. For example:
8
Tips and Tricks
If you need practical guidelines, start with Amazon who has published
specific guidelines on how product naming, bullet points and product
descriptions should be written, check out link here. Apart from that, here
are some general principles:
Maintain shopper-centric narrative, easy to read and comprehend: Use
“Consumer Speak” keywords as opposed to “Brand Speak” keywords.
See example below (note: it doesn’t mean you should compromise the
standard of your product naming structure but take advantage of the
title length!).
Be consistent by product category and across retailers: Although
there’s a general vision that brands should produce product naming (and
content beyond) that speaks to specific types of consumers for a given
product, bear in mind that you should never sacrifice consistency across
retailer outlets (so one product is not described in vastly different ways
on Tesco vs. Amazon).
Brands use “Brand Speak” keywords Brands use “Consumer Speak” keywords
The key to a compelling product name is to
establish trust, to describe exactly what the
product is (and be concise), to distinguish it from
the competition, and to ensure it is coherent and
easy to read.
The goal of product naming strategy is to
provide the shopper with key pieces of product
information that get them interested to make a
click, then the other pieces of product content
come into play: bullet feature points,
product description, product visual content, etc.
9
4. Designing Product Visual Content
& Digital Asset Standard Guideline
by Leveraging DAM
A picture is worth a thousand words, especially when it comes to
browsing products online. When shoppers can’t pick up the product and
read the details as they do in a physical store, what content can quickly
draw their attention to make a purchase?
Product Lead Image(s):
The first impression is always paramount. Product lead image (also
known as primary image) is one of the first things the shopper sees. It is
essentially the product lead image that displays in the search results and
should invite the shopper browsing through to make the next click.
Typically, lead images contain a simple front pack shot of the product
and a mobile ready image (also called Hero Image) which the shopper
will view (via different touch points, e.g. PC vs. mobile) to confirm that
the product is what they are looking for.
All online retailers require standard conventional front of pack shot for
the product. It helps shoppers see that it is not a counterfeit product.
Here are some examples of the standard front of pack shot and mobile
ready image across product categories:
TIP: Don’t be too creative with front
Front Pack Shot pack shot image as the goal, is to
offer shoppers a clean, consistent
online experience when locating your
product. Make sure you familiarise
yourself with retailer’s lead image
guideline. Most of retailers require
the front pack shot created on a
plain white background only be the
product that is being offered with no
additional props.
10Mobile ready image is not a physical product shot, it is a digital
representation of a product illustrating the key elements (brand, format,
variant, size) of the product, making it easily recognisable on smaller
screen like mobile. GSI has recently published mobile ready image
guideline, working in conjunction with some of the biggest FMCG and
CPG companies who are leading this trend. We recommend you to refer
to it for more details.
Mobile Ready Image
Product Enhanced Content:
Before explaining what it is, let’s talk about why you should invest
in product enhanced content. Think about the numerous different
motivations your shoppers may have when visiting a product page,
can you help everyone find the information they’re looking for, without
having to leave the website?
For example, the reverse ROPO shopper who have left to your local store,
has gone online and add a product to their shopping cart. At this point,
how can you maximise this opportunity of encouraging more purchases?
Perhaps you can recommend a good wine to go with that steak they are
about to buy, or suggest a few recipes and do a bit of cross-selling? Or
even better, a branded video to drive your conversion rate.
11So what enhanced content could encourage the purchase and more
purchases? To help shoppers understand your brands quickly and more
efficiently, you could invest in a selection of product enhanced content
related to how to use, packaging from different angles, what’s inside,
UGC (User Generated Content such as benefits, testimonials, awards) or
product videos, etc. Here are some visual examples for your inspiration
(time to get creative!)
Source: Amazon (UK)
12Enhanced Product Content: Country Case Study
China is by far the largest Ecommerce market in the world, not only by
transactions values but also by the variety of enriched product content and
the long-scrolling product pages on e-retailer websites. See enhanced content
best practice examples below:
#1 The long-scrolling product pages #2 E-retailers encourage brands to
create branded-video for quicker
Online shoppers are looking for more purchase conversion
content that goes beyond the basic Brands could create videos or live stream
production information and they want branded content in consumers’ news
enriched product content to inform feeds, and achieve traffic conversion
their purchase decision. and/or achieve purchase conversion
while watching the video (click to buy
spontaneously).
#3 UGC goes beyond texts, now also
include video reviews on-platform
E-retailers integrate the influence power
of KOLs (Key Opinion Leaders) and
iWOM (internet Word of Mouth) to drive
up conversion knowing that Chinese
consumers tend to buy based on
community recommendations.
135. Building a Product Content
Ecosystem for your Digital Shelf
To have all this great content on your digital shelf, doesn’t mean you
need to create everything from scratch, for every product, and every
time. What you need is to establish a digital asset specifications standard
to optimise content re-usability, by leveraging your DAM solution.
Long story short, we have illustrated the concept via this infographic:
• Talk to the teams who are doing image creative design to get a cross-
sample of creative recommendations
• Consult with internal and external experts to collate best practice of
technical specifications for creating the master image. Document in a
standard guideline
• Make sure the master image is created by complying the standard
guideline
• Upload the master image into DAM system. By this point, you have a
very high-res image ready for downstream use
• Lower res image for multiple uses - Print/Point of Sale, multimedia,
Ecommerce, social media and web - can all be created in specific
specs by leveraging DAM’s ability to convert assets on demand.
Technically, you could build channel specific conversion feature inside
of the DAM, or via API to make more customised to downstream
requirements.
14Now you have produced great content in a cost-effective way, what’s
next is to have a robust supply chain and technical solution to manage
the end-to-end process.
Every single marketing technology ecosystem for every organisation is
different.
• Trying to distil the content in terms of what the product content
ecosystem should look like is a tricky task. But there are some great
examples that we have seen and we can try to abstract this to bring
the best practice of how people, process and technology should come
together.
• We have illustrated a high-level landscape of Product Content
Ecosystem in the diagram below. Before diving in, there are some
thoughts we’d like to put forward first:
• Building the product content ecosystem all at once is a nearly
impossible task. Start with key components, and, as long as you
have a clear strategy and a roadmap of how all of the components
will eventually come together, you can, and really should, build the
ecosystem piece by piece.
• Before starting with the technology, you need to look at the context of
your organisation, your existing technical capabilities, and map out the
people journey and data process to come up with a holistic ecosystem
that you can develop.
Now let’s walk through each stage throughout the end-to-end process
and content ecosystem:
15Content Trigger:
The trigger to create new content could be a new product to be
launched, or an existing product to be refreshed, or there’s a gap of your
product content presence online.
Typically, the initial requirement is raised by your brand team,
Ecommerce team, customer insight teams, account manager on retailer
sites, etc.
Content Creation:
Once the content requirement is triggered, there needs to be a clear brief
and instruction on what content is to be created.
You are working with your internal design team or external agencies for
creative briefing.
Typically, this is managed in a Project Management System where you
can track your campaigns and delivery schedules to make sure the brief
is accurately executed and ready for final approval.
Product Data Management:
Going on to the next stage is Product Information Management (PIM)
system.
PIM is usually integrated with upstream ERP platforms (e.g. SAP) to store
and manage your core product information (e.g. GTIN, EAN/barcode,
which country the product is created for, etc.). It also receives product
technical information (e.g. product weight, size, legal and nutrition
information, etc.) from a variety of sources within your organisation. This
particular area is the one that you shouldn’t speed through as you need
to ensure the source of truth is properly orchestrated and governed
to identify unique products accurately and consistently in downstream
processes and systems.
16Product Asset Management:
This is the stage where you have the digital assets that have been
briefed, approved and these fly straight from the Project Management
System into Digital Asset Management (DAM) or manually uploaded
into DAM directly. At some point, you need to link the asset to product
data record that comes from PIM. It is crucial and important to make
sure the person/team who is linking the asset and product data record
knows the information. For example, if your brand team or agency is
responsible for asset creation and is asked to upload assets into DAM
and link the asset to product data record, make sure they are briefed on
what product record to link to. We’ve seen in many cases that marketing
and agency teams simply don’t know what product record should be
linked to the asset (as they just don’t have the information available from
the briefing, so it’s very difficult for them to create that connection).
Essentially, it’s not about how to use the tools, but about orchestrating
your data across systems and connecting the dots throughout business
processes.
PIM and DAM are the two crucial components across the digital
ecosystem and different lifecycles you need to manage. PIM manages
the lifecycle of your product, whilst DAM is a single point of truth of
managing the life-cycle of your digital assets. And those are two different
things. Your product might no longer be on shelf, but the digital assets
may still be re-usable in different channels (e.g. print, OOH). And the
other way around. You have a digital asset with expired usage rights, but
the product is still valid and needs to be sold. Building PIM and DAM in
parallel is an ideal approach, but if you already have one in place, make
sure you adopt the same data orchestration when building the other.
Product Content Distribution:
Come on to the content distribution stage where you send all the
combined product content
(including marketing copy, product data, digital assets) to online stores
or retailer sites. Typically, there are three different “flavours” of content
distribution:
(1) Interim solution via syndicators and aggregators (e.g. Brand
Bank in UK, Equadis in France, Salsify in US) which effectively means
building a global API between your internal ecosystem and third-party
platform (the latter directly integrates with local retailers); or establishing
a product content portal via
(2) “Push” or
(3) “Pull” mechanism to distribute content to retailers.
17Content Auditing & Reporting:
Finally, going to the content auditing and reporting stage. There are lots
of data analytics solutions out there to help you evaluate how complete
your digital shelf looks and how your brands are doing compared with
your competitors, without going through a manual audit process.
Whichever platform you choose, the key point is, that, to make these
auditing solutions truly effective, they need to have a single source of
truth (i.e. your PIM and DAM) to cross-reference and compare against,
then indicate how accurate and compliant your product content is. This
then brings the whole process right back to the original stage to act as
the “content trigger” to close the content gap.
To reiterate what we said at the beginning, you don’t have to build all the solutions
all at once. We have clients who have started the ecosystem journey with just DAM,
then integrated with PIM, then added analytics solution afterwards. We also work
with clients who implemented PIM and DAM solutions together at the same time.
The key point is, what you have built (or are building, or going to build in the
future), adds a really essential piece to your wider marketing technology ecosystem
- your websites, social media platforms, campaign management tools, mobile apps,
etc. Your product data and digital assets are re-usable not just by taking content
from other channels for E-Commerce, but the other way around as well (as we
illustrate in the diagram below).
186. Where to begin with Ecommerce
in Product Content Ecosystem?
TOP TIPS
We get asked a lot by clients “where to begin with this E-commerce
content ecosystem journey?” Far too often we come across clients who
say “hey look, we know this new platform, let’s go with it first then we
will figure things out later on”, “We have bought this platform a while
back ago but never really used it, shall we look into it first?”.
Well, the answer is, if you have nothing in place, start with people (then
work on to process and technology). Otherwise, start with the things
you already know (be it people, process and technology) and map out a
sequence of how these things should come together. Wherever you start,
be assured you don’t have to build everything all at once.
19People
The aim has always been, and continues to be, keeping people (i.e. your
customers, system users, your internal teams) at the centre - this is
the foundation for a successful content ecosystem (and in fact, for any
successful technology selection). We’ve seen successful brands win by
right-sizing the effort initially, and it’s the people that CPG brands should
take to heart.
• Have an executive-level business champion to sponsor the initiative
going forward.
• Involve key business stakeholders earlier rather than later, with multiple
and critical functions actively involved (e.g. packaging, creation,
marketing, media, supply chain, analytics, legal, customer relation, techs,
agency partners, etc.) - they are the “super stars” and “allies” within
your organisation to be part of your digital transformation journey and
contribute to the success.
• Establish accountability from top to bottom
• Integrate and empower teams
• Always keep end users in mind. Have genuine user empathy in terms of
what process really works for them (i.e. your internal teams and external
partners) and what content they (i.e. customers) really want to see.
• Target digital shelf innovation to millennials - they are leading the digital
commerce shift in CPG companies.
20Process
Once you have the interests of your customers, employees, partners and
other stakeholders adequately represented, consider a couple of “user-
centric” points when it comes to mapping out the process:
• Start with developing user stories and business scenarios (rather than
checklist requirements).
• Bear in mind that you should consider user stories as “variants” to
address diverse processes, don’t do this just to justify edge cases.
• When gathering business requirements, focus your inquiry into your
stakeholders’ most burning problems or intense needs.
Maintain the process consistency and quality all the way across so that
your brand has a unified message through your digital ecosystem and
customer shopping journey. Two key points we’d like to highlight here:
• Use common language (technical and business terminology) and
measurement (across systems and processes).
• Enable global to local executional excellence (consistency and quality).
21Technology
• Do your research on who is winning (there is knowledge available, so
you can accelerate quickly)
• Identify, focus, and prioritise on quick win(s).
• Keep a close eye on the market trends which has been going from
integrated solutions towards the “content hub” and “all encompassing”
solutions.
• Enable global to local executional excellence (consistency and quality).
• Even if you’ve come to the late party, you have the benefits of looking
at how the marketing technology for digital shelf evolves and you may
end up being a game changer as you leap-frog the early movers.
22Try to avoid:
1. Technology checklist fetish (i.e. picking a technology because it
passed your exhaustive checklist filters but has little bearing on
whether it is really going to work for you).
2. Emphasis on “big-bang” decision making.
3. Over-analysis and under-experimentation.
4. Inadequate testing and adaptation.
One final
thought on
technology
is... Far too often I read in the press or hear people say
“technology is transforming CPG and retailer as it is
changing the world and even changing the way we
think”.
This is simply not true. We (people) are changing
everything, and technology is merely enabling us
to do so. It is simply a tool, just like the tools our
ancestors used to start fires or chop wood had
enabled them to transform the environment we live
in today.
Modern technology will help us shape the
environment, the retailer and Marketing Technology
landscape of tomorrow, but it is certainly not the
reason for the change - it’s the desire from people
to improve the process and make it better.
23Closing Note
Ecommerce is just as important if not more important
than all other traditional channels that brands have today.
Where the consumer journey starts and ends is becoming
more fluid. Great examples in those well-established
Ecommerce markets, like USA and China, are leading
through innovation by leveraging technologies to blend
online and offline shopping experience to meet consumer
demands (check video links here: Amazon Go Store,
Alibaba Hema Supermarket).
Brands really need to understand that digital shelves are
the future of shopping and Ecommerce is not just a sales
channel, but a marketing and advertising opportunity in
its own right - take advantage of that and create a whole
brand new shopping experience for your consumers to
really surprise and “wow” them!
24Your marketing operations in perfect harmony.
icpnet.com
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