The Connected Commerce Insider event series at dieCuisine in Zurich Altstetten aimed to show ways to succeed in digital marketplaces and to network experts. Attendees were able to gain exciting insights from established marketplace experts in four input presentations, which were followed by lively discussions. First, Bernhard Egger, Managing Director of HANDELSVERBAND.swiss, spoke about how online and offline purchasing behavior in Switzerland has changed in recent years. One trend is clearly emerging: customer behavior is becoming increasingly hybrid. But what does that mean?
Retailers today need to adapt a business strategy that aims to offer a seamless and cross-channel shopping experience that integrates online and offline. This mix needs to be customized to the business and may or may not include connectivity and distribution to one or more marketplaces. One important alternative that was mentioned in this context was the increasing importance of social commerce. Social commerce involves the sale of products or services on social media.
For a successful customer experience, companies today have to offer their customers a wide variety of touchpoints, which only works with targeted investments. This was demonstrated in the presentations by Stefan Lanz, Head of Digitalization at gebana AG and Beat Stoller, Head of Cooperation at haar-shop.ch AG. For both companies, an inspiring and motivating online shopping experience is key. In particular, the gamification aspects of the online store experience at haar-shop.ch generated a lot of enthusiasm: hair colors can be tested using a cell phone camera. To ensure that this always works smoothly, the correct data on the products must always be up to date. This raises the question of how retailers can digitize sustainably, always have all products available in the online store and at the same time ensure the quality of the product data.
At this point, automated product data onboarding has become indispensable for retailers. This was impressively demonstrated in the presentation by Ilario Musio, Head of E-Commerce SportX & Bike World. With 54 stores across Switzerland and an online store, it was clear to the well-known brand SportX that manual maintenance of PIM data was not scalable and therefore not sustainable. They therefore decided to rely on the unique AI-supported Onedot product data platform, which is the only one on the market to offer large-scale product data onboarding.
Today, the product data platform is used in such a way that Onedot maps the suppliers' product catalogs to SportX's product data structure and the processed data is automatically fed into SportX's PIM. This has many different positive effects for SportX: a significant reduction in the error rate of product data and a reduction in repetitive work, a strong scaling of the online business through the targeted expansion of the online range and a faster time-to-market cycle. As a result, SportX has noticeably increased its turnover and can catch up with other providers.
The successful start to the Connected Commerce Insider Event series shows once again that many companies are grappling with issues relating to marketplaces, digitalization and automation and are looking for ways to respond to difficult trade-offs in the best possible way. This is another reason why the exchange among experts in the great location dieCuisine was so appreciated. We would like to thank our partner hmmh for the organization and are already looking forward to the next joint event.
