Venzee Takes the Pain Out of Adding Big Box Retailers

Manufacturers, suppliers and distributors can add sales channels, accelerate speed to market, and earn more revenue, all without more effort or needing to hire more people. Here’s how.

Expanding your sales channel strategy by adding a new big box retailer means more revenue opportunities for your business, but with each new addition you’re faced with the challenge of meeting product data requirements. Sometimes, managing a new retailer relationship is more effort than it’s worth, especially if your team is already stretched thin managing other channels.

Submitting product data to big box retailers with spreadsheets is painful

Submitting your product information to a retailer and ensuring that you meet their requirements is a big task. Traditionally the way vendors have handled this problem is by creating a new set of spreadsheets to share their product information with a retailer. Creating a spreadsheet that includes the categories and format that the retailer requires can take your team hours. And all of that manual manipulation of data — think hundreds of SKUs and dozens of categories — means these spreadsheets are often full of errors. Even your most detail-oriented staff members will make mistakes after spending hours staring at thousands of cells of information.

Add the costly back-and-forth between you and the retailer to identify and fix these errors, and you’re talking lots of time, effort, and money. Every time you want to add a new retailer you are stuck with this painstaking and time-consuming process, slowing the pace of adding new retail partners and getting your products to market.

The product data is all digital, so why not automate this part?

Instead of manually manipulating and submitting your product data, the process can be automated with a data transformation platform like Venzee. What used to take your team hours of costly data entry can now be done automatically.

Data transformation platforms enable you convert your product data from one format to another. Most platforms manage a library of templates organized by retailer and/or product category. These templates are designed based on rules and requirements received from retailers. With a system like Venzee, your product information, no matter the system it currently resides in or the format of the information, can be converted into the format your retail partner requires. While most other data transformation platforms are limited by partnerships, technology, or the speed of human input, Venzee is not. Venzee can transform product information to meet the requirements or any retailer and any system.

And with any of Venzee’s direct integrations (or custom solutions built with Venzee’s API), Venzee can also submit products for you automatically. New product data (e.g., product information, content, inventory, and pricing) can be uploaded from Venzee to your retailer’s system seamlessly. For example, Venzee’s proprietary integration to Bed Bath & Beyond lets vendors easily submit to category-specific product lists and meet the more than 50 required fields for each SKU submission.

Rather than wasting hours on error-prone spreadsheets (Think for a minute on how costly that back-and-forth between vendors and retailers to fix mistakes really is.), you could be translating and transferring product information cleanly and consistently. If your process for submitting product information was that simple, it would be incredibly easy to onboard to a new retailer.

Never fill out an old template again

Venzee keeps track of submission requirements set by big box retailers and automatically adapts your existing product information to meet new requirements. If there are any errors or missing information in your product data, Venzee flags those errors, so you can address them before you submit your products. Venzee validates your data before you submit it, which simplifies communication between vendors and retailers, dramatically reduces buyer rejections, and makes it easy to fix any errors that exist in your product data.

You can get complete, accurate product information to buyers faster, which means your products go live on the retailer’s website faster.

Automation where it counts

The argument for automation is basic: automating repetitive tasks makes operations more efficient. Manual data entry is repetitive. So, stop.

You can the save time, money, and brainpower you waste on manual submissions and submit accurate, complete data sets to Bed, Bath & Beyond, Walmart, Amazon, Wayfair, and more, while you focus on the thing that matters, growth.

You need to be agile and flexible to compete in retail. No matter where you fit in the supply chain, your solution for managing product updates needs to be flexible enough to move with you. That's exactly what Venzee does. We play well with everyone, so you can connect any system you use to manage your products to any sales channel.