Product Management for Marketplaces

Our Client

Our Client is one of the leading Online Retail Market Place in US. The site serves multiple Brands and their categories range from Electronics, Furniture, Home Appliances,  Apparels, Home furnishings, Home Decors, auto parts and many more.

Client Requirement

• The client requirement was to upload 300,000 products to their site every month.
• Create rich product pages with product description, features and specifications.
• Convert the Supplier inventory spreadsheet into bulk product upload format.
• Categorize products to their respective categories and sub categories.

Challenges And Vserve Approach

As soon as we received the requirement, the Vserve team comprising of the IT head,the Project Manager, SME (Social Media Expert) and the Quality Head did a deep dive-to understand the challenges involved in the work. There are many challenges involved in dealing with 100+ product categories and Suppliers.

The Key Challenges

• Domain expertise in 100+ product categories to ensure right content and categorization.
• Managing huge volume of data effectively to minimize errors and deliver products on the site at quick Turn-Around-Time
• Shorten the time for suppliers to market the products to help client increase sales.

A) SUPPLIER INVENTORY SPREADSHEET OR SOURCE FILES

Most of the time the supplier Inventory spreadsheet had very minimal information but our client wanted us to provide complete information for each product. Our team of Data mining experts and content writers worked together in collecting the facts about the product and creating the content around the facts which will match the supplier spreadsheet.

B) FILE FORMATS

We were managing 1000s of suppliers and each supplier had their own format for sending their inventory information. Vserve team had to normalize the information as the first step and convert them to the upload format. The team used various in-house tools and Artificial Intelligence software to normalize the data. Artificial Intelligence and data extraction tools helped us in sourcing the right data prints and our domain experts helped in categorization of data. This helped us to speed up the process.

C) PRODUCT CATEGORIZATION

We ensured the products are not disorderly categorized. This was again a most challenging task because the categories were huge and elaborate, which might have a chance to result in clutters. The Category Experts played a key role in standardizing the Product categories and develop a system for mapping the products to the right category and sub-category.

D) COMPLIANCE WITH GUIDELINES

We were provided with strict guidelines and the team had to be watchful that the product data fields that are set by us are in compliance to the data feed specifications given by the client.

E) TURNAROUND TIME

Meeting the turnaround time was the main challenge as any delay would result in serious financial loss to our client. Hence, a fully trained team comprising of Process executives, Data Mining experts, Quality analyst and content writers was formed to handle the high monthly volume.

Vserve Advantages

• Vserve Tech Team (VTT) analyzed the client requirements and built in a process where manual and automated methods were combined to provide the optimum solution with the highest accuracy rate. The automations developed highly increased the productivity and also the accuracy of the data fields.
• Configurable crawler applications developed by VTT were used extensively to rapidly extract product data from manufacturer sites.
• The Artificial intelligence (AI) tools helped greatly in the recognition of data sent by suppliers in various formats and to perceive them to the standard format.
• Vserve Team developed a cloud based work flow system which enables the client to get the status report from his desktop. The client had to just login and get the status of each supplier.
• Vserve Formed an exclusive team for this project, and with continuous training programs were able to meet the client turnaround time and quality.

Benefits

• Quick Turnaround with High Accuracy
• Unique content helping in SEO and ranking
• Online Status reports and Dashboards
• Rich Content Pages which helps in boosting sales
• Huge Cost savings