Search
Businesses today are searching for faster and more effective ways to gather, manage, distribute and leverage structured and unstructured product information across B2B eCommerce and other online and offline channels. Complete and accurate online content educates customers, builds trust and helps improve their perception of your brand.
But when your product data is incomplete, inconsistent or hard-to-find in your B2B eCommerce sites or offline channels, time-starved customers simply go elsewhere to satisfy their needs, resulting in lost sales and eroding trust that can be deep and long-lasting.
The STEP master data and product information management (PIM) platform enables you to streamline the process of gathering all product data from your suppliers and partners. It helps you cleanse and manage that data centrally. And it allows you to publish more accurate information to your websites, B2B eCommerce applications and other offline channels—faster and more reliably.
With STEP, you can ensure that product data is fit for purpose and meets legal and industry standards using advanced business process and business rules.
Specifically, you can:
For companies that trade through multiple brands and multiple languages, creating and maintaining versions of product information is expensive and time consuming. B2B eCommerce data management tools often lack the features required for the creation and maintenance of multiple versions of information for a product.
But with STEP, you can:
Improve cross-brand and cross-geography consistency
Reduce data-maintenance costs resulting from duplicated effort in your B2B eCommerce and other enterprise systems
Ensure product data completeness and accuracy across brands and geographies
Search technology such as Fredhopper, Endeca and ATG Commerce Search are successful when provided with complete, consistent and rich granular product information. Without such a source, search technology can fall short of business and customer expectations.
STEP can update both your eCommerce catalog and search technology with rich granular product data. This enables you to maximize B2B eCommerce sales and customer experience from search merchandising driven by complete and granular product data. STEP also provides you with metadata used to support superior onsite business logic and an advanced personalization experience on your B2B eCommerce sites.
Too often, SEO is limited to landing pages and category pages due to cost and resource limitations. With STEP, product-page SEO can be integrated with the product data creation and maintenance process. Optimizing product data in STEP helps ensure online product visibility and helps reduce downstream SEO costs. As a result, you’re able to:
New product introduction can be complex and time consuming, resulting in high costs and reduced sales and competitiveness. STEP provides supply-side tools for rapid product onboarding, governed by an optimized business process to ensure new products are on sale across all channels and brands. This allows you to:
Businesses typically use many categories and classifications to manage products. That’s because each operational system and customer-facing channel has different requirements. For B2B eCommerce, buyer categories are used directly online to provide navigation. That’s because B2B eCommerce systems often lack the ability to manage and maintain multiple categories and classifications. Similarly, using buyer categories for online navigation leads to a poor customer experience and limits the ability to support multi-site and internationalization.
STEP manages multiple behind-the-firewall business classifications and online categories. It centralizes category management for all channels. And it helps improve customer experience across multiple brands and geographies
Product data management is a collaborative process incorporating many departments throughout the supply chain. Using a B2B eCommerce product catalog as the primary repository of product information creates a departmental data silo owned by the eCommerce team.
STEP, however, provides a central repository for the entire business. STEP achieves this through role-based user interfaces, operational data views, granular privilege control and cross-department collaborative business processes. It enables you to:
Segregate duties and responsibilities across the business
Create a central repository for all departments and channels
Eliminate the cost of maintaining duplicate data silos and IT systems
Using a B2B eCommerce product catalog as the primary repository of product information can limit IT flexibility. To optimize the product data management process and usage, the product eCommerce catalog is integrated w
