Salsify, the Commerce Experience Management (CommerceXM) platform empowering brand manufacturers, distributors, and retailers to win on the digital shelf, announced a new report Breaking Down Barriers to Winning Commerce to help brands and retailers understand and address the roadblocks that stand in the way of delivering the omnichannel shopping experiences customers expect.
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Until recently, brands and retailers have operated with an established set of roles where brands ran campaigns to drive awareness and foot to retail locations, and retailers owned the real estate, customer relationship, and experience.
Now, brands must act like retailers, manage merchandising strategy, manage customer relationship management (CRM), and often operate direct-to-consumers channels. At the same time, retailers act like brand manufacturers, given the rise of private-label products and third-party selling.
“In today’s world of infinite shelf space and consumer-driven search, legacy technologies and processes built for a slow physical shelf with limited assortments must be upgraded,” said Rob Gonzalez, co-founder and CMO at Salsify. “Brands and retails both win by removing friction across the supply chain, reducing time to market, and enabling cross-functional and now cross-supply chain collaboration at scale.”
Breaking Down Barriers to Winning Commerce helps brands and retailers navigate this fundamental shift where consumers decide how, when, and where to make purchases. For example, according to a recent report, 46% of retailer shoppers in the US abandon both online and in-store purchases if they don’t find the relevant product information they expect.
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Breaking Down Barriers to Winning Commerce addresses the new set of barriers retailers, and brands face, including:
Complexity of the consumer journey. Shopping happens everywhere. Competition and product selection are virtually endless. The shopper’s journey is nonlinear.
The line between brands and retailers has blurred. Organizations and business relationships built on a legacy of traditional roles are now figuring out how to operate.
Walled gardens. Brands and retailers can no longer afford to pay fees to intermediaries that do not add value and slow down time-to-market.
Organization and technology silos at brands. Ecommerce budgets are often small and don’t account for the influence, while trade budgets are set without visibility into broad influence. Also, the systems for market-facing product information and channel inventory management are often disconnected.
IT is saddled with all the data problems at retailers. IT teams are forced to support multiple data streams and troubleshoot requests related to product information.
POS channels are siloed at retailers. Each sales channel at a retailer has had its own promotional budget, sales targets, and product assortment priorities.