What is Syndication?
Venzee provides an automated solution for product content syndication. In this post, we define syndication, explain its complexities, and describe how Venzee is tackling supply chain's biggest challenge.
What is syndication?
Syndication is the movement of information from one location to another. When product data undergoes syndication, product attributes, or things that represent a product, are transferred from a manufacturer to a retail selling channel. For Venzee, this refers to the transfer of data across the digital supply chain from manufacturing clients and PIM partners’ source files in a readable format for corresponding retailers.
Sending product attributes from one place to another sounds pretty straightforward. However, the process can be extremely tedious, time-consuming, and costly when completed manually.
Syndication should be simple. Why is manual syndication so complicated?
Traditionally, the syndication of product information has involved the manual exchange of spreadsheets between manufacturers and retailers. This involves numerous steps that require enormous attention to detail, including the organization, validation, transformation, and transportation of product attributes. This process can take months to complete.
Manufacturers — those that make products to sell to retailers — struggle to connect and comply with a growing, endless, ever-changing set of sales channel data requirements. Since different retailers use unique selling platforms, brands and manufacturers must learn how each unique portal works through training or their own research.
If overcoming this learning curve for one retailer sounds time-consuming, imagine repeating the process for hundreds of retailers. This averts energy from company operations that could be focused on more value-added tasks. In effect, manual syndication lacks rapid scalability because of the time and resources it takes to integrate with new selling channels.
Automated syndication is simple and scalable.
Automation is the key to simpler syndication. Tools like artificial intelligence and machine learning can streamline and accelerate the monotonous transfer, transformation, and delivery of data.
Here at Venzee Technologies, we use automation to figure out retailer requirements and translate product information into an acceptable format. As an end-to-end syndication technology, we deliver transformed data across the entire digital supply chain — including last mile delivery to retailers. This helps our clients win on the digital shelf.
Brands no longer need to deal with thousands of spreadsheets for different retailers. At Venzee’s new Syndication Solutions store, brands can simply connect to global retailers with the click of a button. All they need to do is look through our list of over 400 retailers, add them to their shopping cart, and make a purchase. It’s that simple.
Many companies that have maintained decades of consumer loyalty are realizing they will lose business unless they establish a digital connection that informs and engages consumers. When consumers shop online, they need accurate and complete product information to make informed purchases. In addition to persuading consumers to buy their products, brands and retailers need to guarantee consumers receive exactly what they purchased.
Without a doubt, digital supply chains are necessary for more accurate and accessible product data. At Venzee, we try our best to remove the complexity of syndication with intelligent supply chains so brands, manufacturers and PIM partners can optimize operations, save time, and accelerate sales.
For more information about syndication, listen to our podcasts “What is Syndication?” and “Revolutionary Selling in the Digital Supply Chain Industry.”
To learn more about Venzee, visit venzee.com and follow us on LinkedIn or Twitter.
Key Terms:
Channel: A connection to a retailer
Syndication: The transfer of product information. For Venzee, this is referring to the transfer of data from manufacturing clients/PIM partners source files to a format that is readable for the corresponding retailers
PIM: Product Information Management. To us at Venzee, PIMs are our partner organizations who manage and distribute product information from our manufacturing clients. PIMs provide the user interface (UI) platform for our manufacturing clients.