Whether it’s manufacturers, distributors or retailers, businesses face a unique set of challenges when looking to make a mark in digital commerce. Whether its managing omnichannel presence, driving online conversions and product discovery, reducing cart abandonment and managing product data syndication with distributors and retailers. Product information management plays a critical role in setting the right foundation for digital commerce, be it catalog management, product organization & management, or digital asset management and product data syndication, businesses must be on the top of their game in every aspect to own the digital shelf and build an engaging digital experience for its customers. Amaze PXM enables businesses to solve inherent product data problems, streamline the product data journey, and clear the path for improved conversions and revenue growth.

Amaze PXM Solves These Top Four Business Problems

Catalog Management & Product OrganizationProduct (SKU) Content ManagementDigital Asset ManagementProduct Data Syndication

Catalog Management & Product Organization

When a business sells products online, it is faced with the daunting task of managing products, and corresponding product data, that run into tens of thousands, if not more. The task of managing this repository of products, referred to as a ‘catalog’, is compounded by the very nature of digital commerce – instant, touch-point intensive and diversified. The biggest challenge businesses face in this context is to ensure that their catalogs have the most up-to-date product data at all times. Multiple touchpoints and stakeholders make this a nightmare.

Ensuring that these products are correctly and consistently categorized with standardized taxonomy poses yet another challenge. The same goes for attribution rules and schema to define these qualities.

Amaze PXM gives businesses a centralized platform to organize products so that they are easy to find and edit. Teams can easily build hierarchical category structures (taxonomies) to organize catalogs and house products in relevant categories. The platform enables teams to define product attributes that help thoroughly define these products. It also enables Schema definition – a process that delineates which attributes are relevant to different taxonomy categories. Finally, Amaze enables businesses to consolidate these steps by helping them set up data governance rules that ensure accuracy and completeness of product data.

The key features highlights in Amaze:

• Multiple catalog and alternate hierarchy setup
• Easy taxonomy and attribute management – add, edit, move, delete – in bulk mode for greater efficiency and throughput
• Strong schema management with easy to use setup of data governance rules
• Inherited schema properties
• Advanced analytics and actionable reports – showing quality metrics, bulk modifications, and automated fixes

Product (SKU) Content Management

In today’s online age, almost every potential customer views and/or purchases products online. This is not only true for B2C transactions, but also applicable to high volume B2B purchase decisions. Therefore, the findability, accuracy, meaningfulness, and completeness of product data is of paramount importance to succeed in an online world.

That said, when organizations deal with millions of SKUs, manually imposing these levers on each and every SKU is effort-intensive, if not impossible. This leads to a whole lot of productive time being spent on finetuning SKUs, and despite all these efforts, it leaves the door ajar for potential inaccuracies, inconsistencies and duplication. The result: missed sales, plummeting revenue and a negative brand/company image.

Amaze enables businesses to mitigate this challenge with a software solution that drives great product information. With automated mechanisms and data governance rules, Amaze makes product content management a breeze.

The key feature’s in Amaze PXM:

• Real time application of fully customizable data governance rules and flagging of bad/wrong/missing data for products
• Easy correction in bulk
• Product classification management – put, move, delete, shift
• Product cross listing in multiple taxonomies
• Sophisticated attribute data analysis and statistical projections
• Automated unit of measure conversions
• Intelligent product family management (aka, product cohorts)
• SKU authoring – automated data capture from external web sources
• E-commerce type customizable Product Detail Page (PDP) view and edit of SKUs – mimicking how the end customer will see the product on an ecommerce site

Digital Asset Management

Continuing the topic of needing to have great product data quality, it goes without saying that images, videos, spec sheets, etc. are no longer optional to describe any product. Such digital assets (DA) are essential. But it is not an easy task to manage these assets in a concise library, ensuring that they are linked to the correct products, controlling/editing image quality (resolution, size, aspect ratio, etc.) for various publication needs, and onboarding assets from any kind of source system. Most commercially available Digital Asset Management (DAM) systems are inept at solving all the issues. With Amaze, the feature rich DAM is inbuilt and seamlessly integrates with catalog and product management modules.

• Easy import of DAs – from public URLs, zip files, Google drive, Dropbox, client laptop/desktop folder/files – all done in bulk in a superfast manner
• Automated processing of uploaded assets – creation of thumbnail images, identification of file properties, etc.
• Template driven mass modification of images to change image attributes, add watermarks, and many other standard image management actions
• Automated identification of what the image is about and creation of keywords and tags associated with the image
• Link/Delink DAs to SKUs, product families, taxonomy categories and attributes

Product Data Syndication

Product information is useless if it simply sits as static data at rest. The supply chain and online selling ecosystem requires the transfer and transformation of data from one organization to another, or one constitute of different distributors, online marketplaces and maybe its own ecommerce site. Similarly, distributors and retailers receive product data from multiple suppliers, and may then publish the data to an eCommerce site and online marketplaces. All the good work done in solving the three business problems mentioned above, can be instantly undone if the product is not correctly syndicated between disparate systems.

This is why organizations must rely on a rule based, easily configurable, continuously learning channel syndication software instead of managing the data interoperability manually through spreadsheets and other crude methods. Amaze provides a function-rich syndication platform that allows users to send and receive product information without the burden of managing the transformations every time. Users build transformation rules which qualify products from a source catalog to a target catalog. Once built, the rules will continually evaluate SKUs and automatically change their eligibility and attribute population based on any changes that may have been made to either the SKU data or the catalog structure.

• Quicker adoption of product changes and new product introduction – days versus months
• Build the rules once, let it work without maintenance
• No programming knowledge needed – an English-based intuitive wizard guides users
• Extremely scalable to work with multiple channels, transforming millions of SKUs
• Ability to create simple to complex rule sets – sequential application, “and/or” conditions, arithmetic operations, regular expressions, merging/splitting of attribute data, intelligent unit of measure transformation, etc.
• Real time validation management – visualization of inaccurate and incomplete SKU data if created rules did not meet the target catalog’s governance rules

Other Significant Features in Amaze

Extensive and Superior Integration

The syndication problem described above can be divided into two types of syndication based on the type of entity with whom the data interoperability is to take place. A known entity is a company, online marketplace or ecommerce platform which is well known and widely used. A non-standard entity is generally a company who is a trading partner to the Amaze customer, but does not fall under the known entity list.

1. Send data to known entities

Product data in Amaze PXM can be easily syndicated to many well-known entities. The data transfer can happen seamlessly as a “sync” operation where Amaze directly talks to the entities internal system. Alternatively, Amaze can generate physical data files in a layout and format that is directly consumable by the entity without any manual intervention. Some examples of major known entities Amaze connects to:

• Online marketplaces
  • Amazon
  • Shopify
  • Wayfair
• E-commerce platforms (i.e. any ecommerce site build on these platforms)
  • Magento
  • WooCommerce
  • BigCommerce
  • Oro
• Major distributors/retailers
  • Grainger
  • Fastenal
  • Office Depot
• Data pools
  • CNET
  • Etilize
  • Affiliated Distributors (AD)
• Standards
  • BMECat

Amaze continues to build on integration options with entities as part of the development roadmap. Currently Amaze PXM integrates with 100+ eCommerce marketplaces and distribution channels.

2. Send and receive data to/from non-standard entities

This is where the syndication module of Amaze (aka, Bridge) is used – to create transformation rules which are fully customizable and executable against any set of a source catalog and target catalog.

Amaze Intelligence (Astro)

Amaze achieves this in two ways:

Smart Recommendations: Astro was built on a repository of over 100 million SKUs and catalog structures across several industry verticals. The recommendation engine finds similarities between what the user is trying to do and through machine learning matches with data found in the repository filled with real life actual data.

Data Intelligence: Intelligence is inbuilt in the Amaze PXM’s user experience. Ranging from catching common typos to figuring out context-aware data correctness, Amaze helps users identify data problems that may not be caught by standard governance rules.

Workflow & Authorization

With multiple teams and stakeholders dealing with product data, it is often a nightmare for businesses to keep track of changes made. Most organizations will want to implement a business workflow where changes made to product and catalog data can be managed effectively – notified, reviewed, approved or rejected, corrected. Amaze allows this workflow set up for several types of change management such as taxonomy management, product data, digital assets, etc.

It is important for an organization to define a business process which limits control and access to different job roles in the company. The fine-grained security authorization module in Amaze helps achieve this by allowing the user to build security roles whose privileges can be configured at an atomic level (aka, CRUD – Create, Read, Update, Delete).

Streamline the product data journey with Amaze PXM, and clear the path for improved conversions and digital revenue growth.