Retailers can proactively respond to growing product content demands by automating content submissions for suppliers and brands.

Venzee simplifies life for brands with intelligent product content distribution for multiple retailer connections, enabling brands to deliver content from a single source of truth to more sales channels accurately and with less manual effort and allocated labor. To guide brands to the most value from Venzee’s channel integrations as quickly as possible, Venzee certifies all of our retailer connections based on the level of integration and automation each retailer supports.

Retailers too see immediate and significant value from Venzee. As brands and suppliers are improving the quality of their product content and their processes for managing it, value cascades to the retailer level, where retailers receive complete content that matches their requirements via Venzee’s intelligent content distribution platform. When integrated with Venzee, retailers can phase out fragmented content handling processes, where error-prone and time-consuming manual updates made by human content teams are the status quo.

‍For retailers, the journey to content efficiency begins with Venzee certification. Read on to find out more about our program and process.

Current situation: Retailers currently rely on inefficient manual processes

Today, it’s difficult for brands to get product content to retailers. Retailers have unnecessarily cumbersome and complicated content submission processes, and, while not all retailers have the same lack of ingestion capabilities, each retailer has its own unique content collection process. From the perspective of brands and suppliers, no retailer content collection process is ideal, and these dated processes drive labor costs and impact margins for both suppliers and retailers.

According to Brendan Witcher of Forrester Research, “Rising customer expectations for seamless brand experiences underscore how important it is for commerce solutions to work together more closely than ever to harmonize information across systems and touchpoints.”

As demand for product content in digital formats grows, as it inevitably will continue to do, product content distribution will become even more difficult for brands to manage, which in turn negatively impacts retailers. Scaling current content handling processes to meet demand will exacerbate the existing bottleneck, resulting in even lower profit margins for all trading partners.

Venzee's solution: Streamlined, elegant connectivity lowers costs and increases revenue

Venzee solves retail’s prevailing content problem with automation facilitated by system-to-system connectivity. Venzee provides an intelligent technology solution to replace manual product content updates, removing labor costs and facilitating sales channel scale. Retailers and suppliers spend less on content handling and are positioned to earn more revenue.

“Consumer relevance requires brands and manufacturers to move past labor-intensive, error-prone manual processes. Brands winning market share today leverage Venzee's highly automated, intelligent, and cross-functional platform to scale brand engagement across an endless range of global channels,” John Abrams, VP of Partner Development at Venzee said.

Venzee’s intelligent content distribution platform automates the transformation and delivery of product content from brands to retailers. How? We partner with the content management solutions that brands and suppliers rely on to manage their product content and build out integrations so product content can flow system-to-system from brands out to all of their retailers. On the retailer side, Venzee certifies retailer connections and actively manages retailer format and content requirements as they change. Venzee is building a certified network of retailers and technology partners to make product content distribution frictionless through better-connected supply chains.

The Venzee Certified Network

In Q2 of 2019, we launched the VCN program, designed to guide technology partners to maximum value through simplifying their content distribution process through workflow automation and integration. The program provides a clear path to full integration with Venzee’s intelligent content distribution platform. The VCN and defined ingestion certification levels give our technology partners a way to see how advanced the ingestion capabilities for a given retailer or sales channel are. And, with certification for parties on both sides of the supply chain relationship--ingestion certification for retailers, marketplaces, ecommerce platforms, and other sales channels and distribution certification for content management providers (Product Information Management (PIM), Data Asset Management (DAM), Master Data Management (MDM), and Enterprise Resource Planning (ERP), the program offers more transparency into Venzee’s structured engagements with partners and retailers.

VP of Enterprise Business Peter Montross said, “We recognize that Venzee is one of the first technology companies to offer true integration to retailers, and by being transparent about our process, we aim to instill confidence in our partners, prospects, and the clients they serve.  Venzee certified retailers can leverage connections to thousands of brands and trading partners already taking the steps to improve the quality of their product content. Becoming Venzee-certified demonstrates a retailer's commitment to a more streamlined and efficient content submission process for its suppliers.”

About certification for retailers

Venzee’s Mesh platform facilitates retailer connections for technology partners; however, not all retailers share the same level of connectivity to Mesh, as constrained by a retailer’s existing technology solution, developer resources, or time. And while some level of intelligent content distribution is available for any retail channel through Venzee, limited integration may affect the efficiency and speed with which technology partners can expect to exchange product data and receive feedback from a retailer. To help manage partner expectations, Venzee certifies retailers, marketplaces, ecommerce platforms, and other retail channels that receive product information from multiple sources and, potentially, in multiple formats for content ingestion. For Venzee, the more advanced a retailer’s capabilities, the more data we can exchange with a partner and brand. Higher certification levels in the VCN correlate to more advanced content ingestion capabilities.

Venzee simplifies the connection process by awarding certification levels based on a retailer’s ability to ingest product content efficiently, enabling brands and their technology solutions to plan distribution support for retailer channels accordingly. Retailers are awarded certification ranging from levels 1-6. As retailers level up, signifying better integration to Venzee, content management systems that are certified for distribution can take advantage of improved content capabilities and data exchange with these retail channels. The higher the certification, the more advanced capabilities a retailer has, and the more value it sees from Venzee. VCN levels can help retailers prioritize internal goals for handling product information from suppliers that will that will result in markedly lower cost, more automation, more revenue. Additionally, Venzee certification levels give retailers a clear understanding of how their technology compares to that of other retailers and provide guidance on the steps they can take to immediately improve how they are ingesting content.

A more streamlined process from level 1

Retailers and brands see immediate value from level 1 certification, and value grows as they advance to higher levels in the VCN. At level 1, retailers start receiving higher quality product content from suppliers and brands that is automatically transformed to current retailer requirements. Higher levels of certification improve cost savings and increase revenue, as streamlining content handling processes (i.e., eliminating manual steps) means less labor, more efficiency, fewer product returns, better scale, and other competitive advantage in the market.

Venzee provides significant value at our most basic level of integration, and the VCN program provides a clear guide for when partners will see increased value from the retailer connections they would like to support. Retailers are all at various stages in developing their platforms, portals, and other supplier solutions. By referring to a retailer’s certification level, Venzee optimizes timelines and implementation stages for our technology partners. Venzee enables our technology partners to avoid building unique solutions to connect to retailers (and the long, expensive development processes required for such solutions) with a pure-play API for intelligent content distribution. Our solution addresses the needs of brands demanding better control over their product content and a better process for delivering content to all of their retail channels. With clear goals, timelines, and guidance set forth in our VCN program, we deliver the most value from Venzee technology as quickly as possible for our partners.

Currently, and only two months after the launch of the VCN, we have rapidly growing certified retailer and sales channel connections in 15 countries across the globe, including Amazon, Walmart, Bed Bath & Beyond, Target, Home Depot, Shopify, Pier 1, and Kroger.

Digital supply networks and Venzee’s Mesh API

Venzee is solving the problem of distributing content to retailers efficiently with intelligent product content distribution made possible with end-to-end connectivity and automation powered by Venzee’s Mesh API. Retailers, suppliers, and the technology solutions they rely on require connectivity to overcome product data challenges and to scale product data flow to meet the growing needs of digital retail. As Venzee continues to expand its network of certified content management systems and retailers and sales channels, we’re becoming even more adept at distributing content efficiently and elegantly for all of commerce.