Product Information Distribution Services: “PIDS” is the next e-commerce buzzword
Product data distribution is about to become a hero among brands as businesses seek to manage the distribution of all their content from a single location.
There is a saying, “For a person with a hammer, everything looks like a nail.” I design commerce systems, so it’s not surprising that everywhere I look, I see products. That leads to interesting discussions when online commerce is introduced into new industries.
People in the insurance industry talk about quotes and applications. In the travel industry, professionals discuss travel packages, hotel rooms, and airplane tickets. Apartment and car rentals are all about contract terms. In the public sector, citizens are charged for parking tickets, business permits, and taxes – and some receive social assistance.
Businesses offer and sell products and services online. In the end, a product can be simple or complex, ready for checkout, or require configuration before customers can buy it. Products can be purchased instantly at checkout or with a more complex payment terms system – or a product can actually be a service and paid for based on use. A product can be something physical that must be shipped, or a digital asset that is downloaded or streamed.
From a commerce perspective, whether physical or digital, tangible or service-oriented, everything is a product. As you engage in the digital transformation of your business, there are many benefits to adopting a generic approach towards what you offer your customers.
Products should be discoverable
At the core of every omni-channel commerce system is a catalog, a collection of product information that can be browsed, searched, socialized, and compared. There are descriptions, pictures, and specifications displayed on product detail pages. Products can be commented on, priced, promoted, liked, and shared. You can get all this functionality by just cataloging whatever your business offers.
Let’s consider how this can be applied to the public sector. All levels of government from federal to regions or cities provide a variety of services to their constituencies. Usually, their Web sites are far from the gold standard for usability. You know what you want is there, but you struggle to find it. Some of the services cost money, such as a business license, or a pass to the community center swimming pool. In other places, the content is free, including community services and information for citizens and visitors. Some social services may even pay people, rather than charging a fee.
By modeling all of these items as products, you can take advantage of a standard way of presenting information, and classifying each one for easier discovery and better presentation. You can also use product attributes for advanced search and faster navigation. A catalog can also optimize SEO, to help search engines direct customers and users directly to the page for the product they want.
Consider a rental company with an inventory of apartments. Each apartment is a separate product in the catalog with pictures, price, location map, amenities, local information, and the date when it becomes available. Potential tenants can search, discover, compare, and complete an application.
Items can be bundled
Since everything in a catalog is a product, it may be easier to mix them all together to sell multiple services and products in a single transaction.
There are plenty of examples across multiple industries when businesses need to do this. In the public sector, you can register your kids for several community activities at the same time, add them all to the cart, and pay for them all. Telcos sell bundles with a landline, mobile plan, cellphone, accessories, Internet access, Cable TV, and different modems, which you can either buy or lease. Customers expect a smooth, consistent experience, and the only way to achieve it with such a wide variety of products and services bundled together is to have a flexible, generic catalog.
Airlines are selling plane tickets, vacation packages, and travel insurance. Add travel guides to that and you can bundle together several digitally configured products of different types, plus a tour book, which needs to be shipped to the buyer.
The Internet of Things (IoT) is changing how manufactured products are sold. A device becomes smart when it is bundled together with a cloud service or additional client software. You can easily add services to a catalog of physical devices if everything is modeled as products.
Pandemic reveals companies on edge: 3 ways digital ecosystems can help
Amid COVID-19, digital ecosystems are helping companies combine resources, create digital products, services, or subscription models. This simplifies the consumer journey, and increases loyalty and brand relevance.
Future growth and change
Commerce people don’t know everything about what they are going to sell in the future, what companies their employer will acquire, what partnerships they are going to forge, and how their offerings are going to evolve. So, business must always be agile and fast to react.
Innovative insurance companies are redefining their businesses from selling insurance policies to reducing risk. Such a shift immediately widens the types of products and services companies sell. If you are in the reducing risk business along with selling home insurance, you may sell fire alarms and smart locks bundled with a home security system. IoT converts hardware manufacturers into software companies with digital products.
All these internal changes to your business and underlying IT infrastructure should not be immediately visible to your customers, and should not negatively affect their experience when they engage with your brand.
Taking a generic approach to modeling services and goods in a catalog allows your business to take full advantage of existing investments in commerce systems and infrastructure. It also enables many new, successful commerce best practices, regardless of what you sell, now, or in the future.
