Optimizing eCommerce for Manufacturers and Distributors: Q&A

This blog post is a recap of questions that were asked by real manufacturers and distributors during a Distribution Strategy Group webinar on Understanding the New Wave of eCommerce Technology that we took part in. You can find the entire recording of that webinar here.

Question: How can manufacturers effectively ensure that distributors promptly update their eCommerce sites with the latest product information, including descriptions, images, and part numbers, to maintain accurate and current data online?

The folks like DDS and others that provide a summary of product data from manufacturers down to distributors is a great resource that you can commercialize and pay for, but at the end of the day, I'm a pretty big believer in that your website is a direct reflection of your business's communication channels and collaboration channels. This is commonly seen with distributors and manufacturers of just vendor management/partner management kind of thing. I fully believe manufacturers and distributors all have the right individual intentions, but it is a partnership, where if the manufacturer is selling directly online, also with distributors, there's some skin in the game there and you know, some channel conflict. At the end of the day, one thing that you don't want to do is have the distributor find product specs and things like that on their own, but particularly if it involves safety data sheets. It should always start from the manufacturer, and if the distributor wants to do their own thing within certain guardrails, that's fine, but also in a governance of the manufacturer in a way. It's a top-down approach, but also, it's a common problem. If product data was perfect everywhere, there wouldn't be multimillion dollar businesses built off of it. But it does affect many things, including things like search as well, there's a downstream effect here that you really have to tackle it at the source.

Question: Who holds ownership of PIM data when it is provided by a company like DDS?

It can be a surprise on in terms of conditions when maybe you decide to switch vendors. Like, yeah, we actually own that you can't take it with you. Then oh, what do we do now? So that's one of those things when you're when you're picking out solutions. That's a great question to ask who owns this data. In particular, when I would go through and evaluate technologies, you always think about what's my exit strategy? Before we even sign the contract, what's my exit strategy kind of a situation? Because it's all about risk management. It's a great question and one that should be done with due diligence on the front end as much as possible.

Question: Are there concerns about using generative AI tools for website content creation, given that some may utilize copyrighted information as part of their learning process?

I can certainly say there's always concerns about having your information out there. That's just the same as everyone else's, we can clearly tell it came from the same source. I think content and information that's unique to you, with a sample set of data, it has diminishing returns to it. If you have a small sample data set, and it's not going to magically just create things for you, you do have a confidence level there. When it comes to things like pricing and inventory AI analytics about what's the best price point from a floor ceiling inventory, you don't necessarily want to use other organizations data, nor would that be allowed from a pool data set perspective. You do need to have a large internal sample to go off of, but when it comes to that gray area of loose content, think about it like music, look at how much music is being created off of sample sets of things that are already done, and legal problems that results in same difference here. Do you want to be the same as everyone else? Customers do notice that this looks the same as this and now you're back to just price shopping like your value proposition is based off price.

Question: Who retains ownership of data after it has been modified using AI or other tools, and are suppliers comfortable with distributors and downstream customers altering their product information?

So last year, Gartner did a really big study with CMOs, that basically said only 29% of martech spend was utilized in technology. That's because a significant amount of the technology that is being purchased is vastly underutilized. Then when you talk about budgets, well, things don't go so well, right. So I think of AI oftentimes, and there's a lot of vendors with a lot of technology being created every single day. It's a solution to maybe a problem you don't currently have. I'm a stickler about identifying the problem space first, and then applying the solution space to it, versus the opposite, which has a significant amount of risk. To say, "this is a solution to a problem. I don't know that we have it, but let's buy it for three years and figure it out after the fact." If I know anything about B2B, it's more about stability and risk management than anything else. Right? You need to identify the problem space first, if I see this shiny thing, I need to I need to kind of mentally figure out how can it help us with a problem we currently have versus we'll figure that out after the fact. It's pretty dangerous to do. Sometimes that can work out, I'm not saying it can't. But I think that's a big piece in the in debt, just hey, show me under the hood a little bit, right, but you can you kind of show me what the backend looks like and how the technical folks go? Yeah, that's just an if/then statement.

Question: How do companies handle orders from customers in areas where they're not authorized to distribute? Is a "locked" site requiring account creation and pre-order verification a good strategy, or could it discourage potential customers?

Some things when I think about, number one, it may be because of franchise agreements, for example if you know, you can't really control if someone orders something from Alaska or not all the time, right, or if they order and then shipped it to Alaska that's out of your hands at that point. But I would say putting things again, behind a login, have it part of segmentation, you really have to be good about your governance of is this product sellable to this kind of customer, whether it's a consumer a business government is really big into this in particular when it comes to contracts. And so when it comes to Dave's point about people who can log in and which folks are allowed to add to cart in which folks are allowed to check out sometimes those user roles and responsibilities are the right gatekeeping mechanism from a governance perspective to put in place versus you can create an account and just do whatever you want. So sometimes by nature, if it's a guest checkout that has a simple login not tied to a business, you may have to simplify your catalog to where they can't see those things that you know, or have, just have a grayed out you can't add to cart, you can still see it in the catalog, but it's grayed out and tell they've associated themselves to a segment or customer and hear your peer for example. So a lot of business rules that take place from a logic perspective.