Salsify Modernizes Antiquated Product Libraries For the Digital Shelf
Demand is exploding for Salsify Open Catalog with more than 4,000 Grocery, Pet, and Alcohol brands, including Kraft, Mars, and Unilever sharing their ecommerce-optimized product content with retailers
Salsify, the Product Experience Management (PXM) platform empowering brand manufacturers, distributors, and retailers to win on the digital shelf, today announced that Salsify Open Catalog, the industry’s only free product catalog featuring brand-owned content, has reached several significant milestones one year after launch. These milestones underscore retailers’ preference for brand-owned content as the best source of truth in order to deliver the best consumer experiences and drive optimum ecommerce results. They include:
- SKU Coverage: Salsify Open Catalog, currently focused on the Grocery, Pet, and Alcohol product categories, recently surpassed 125,000 individual items, or SKUs, that may be accessed by any retailer free of charge. The average grocery store features around 40,000 SKUs. Additional SKUs are added to the Open Catalog by brands every day.
- Brand coverage: Over 4,000 brands from Salsify’s brand manufacturer customers are currently publishing to Open Catalog. For many, that is an automatic refresh to the catalog anytime their product listings are updated, so that retailers know they are always pulling the most current data from the source that knows the product best, the brands themselves.
This is in contrast with many of the existing product data libraries that were created before the digital shelf. In that time, the simplest content was needed to put a product in store and create advertising circulars. For this need, third parties built businesses with exclusive arrangements with retailers to create data and images taken from the product packaging. That method is costly and broken, and unnecessary now that brands have made huge investments to become their own best merchandisers.
The shopper on the digital shelf requires a richer and more reliably accurate product detail page to make their buying decision with confidence, and that data must be able to be refreshed at any time. In a recent report, more than half of all consumers surveyed said they wouldn’t buy a product with bad product content that doesn’t include enough information or includes low-quality product images.
Salsify customers publishing to the Open Catalog include Anheuser-Busch, The J.M. Smucker Company, Kellogg, Kraft-Heinz, Nestle Purina, Mars, McCormick, and Unilever.
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“Salsify Open Catalog has allowed us to make our up to date content and product information visible to retailers that may not have not known otherwise,” said Megan Stritch, Assistant Manager, Content Syndication at The J.M. Smucker Company. “We love the ability to provide efficiency for both our internal stakeholders and retailer partners and this tool gives us that connection.”
- Retailer adoption: To date, over 100 grocery, pet, and alcohol retailers are pulling from Open Catalog free of charge. Open Catalog is the only product catalog where access is available free of charge to both sides of the equation, Salsify customer brands and retailers. Retailers tapping into Open Catalog include DoorDash, Drizly, and Shipt.
Recently, Salsify Open Catalog has been recognized as “Product Experience Management Platform of the Year” in the inaugural RetailTech Breakthrough Awards program.
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“The days are over when grocers could satisfy their product data needs through third-party supplied shots of the packaging. The digital shelf is a volatile place, constantly requiring more volume and variety of data to win,” said Rob Gonzalez, co-founder and CMO of Salsify. “Building a global PXM network that unites brands and retailers in a collaborative effort to build product experiences that attract, delight, and convert the shopper requires multiple approaches, and Open Catalog is a foundational piece of that strategy. The results of its first year are a clear sign that our approach is working, and we are very excited about the expansion to come.”
