Welcome to the Retail platform! We are honored to welcome you as a new customer. Our system will help you with the processing and communication of your product data. We pride ourselves in being able to offer you a program which is easy to use and self-explanatory. We also offer quick and proper guidance when you have questions.
However, every first step requires a guiding hand. At Productsup, we want to make sure that you have all the info you need to get started. We do this via the onboarding process, where we take you through the beginning of your working relationship with Productsup, discuss frequently asked questions and show you the common stumbling blocks. We also check to see how we can further cater the system to your specifications, and most importantly, make your data compatible with the Retail platform and ready to send out to all desired retailers!
The onboarding process takes a couple of weeks (an average of six weeks). How many weeks are necessary depends on the amount and completeness of the data you provide. The better your delivered data, the less time your onboarding process will take. We strongly encourage you to make use of this opportunity, as this will allow you to become familiar with our systems and our team. Personalized help is something we pride ourselves on at Productsup!
In this article, we will discuss the steps of the onboarding process in order. We will discuss what kind of information we will need from you in order to make the process go smoothly. Since this is your very first step, we will not go into detail too much in this document. Other documents or simple practice with our system will ensure you master it in no time. If you have any questions or would like more information at any time, do not hesitate to contact our support division as discussed at the end of this article and the article ‘Get in touch with our support team’.
WELCOME, NEW CUSTOMER!
As a new customer, you will have been contacted by our ‘New Business’ team. The team will assign you to one of our account managers, who will take care of the data of your organization. The account manager will also plan a meeting between you, the account manager, and the Customer Experience Manager. In this meeting, you will be asked to deliver information to help us register you in the system properly, and to make working with the Retail platform quick and efficient for your organization and its customers and retailers. In this article, we will describe the information which will be requested of you – a list of brands and their logo assets, assets and their follow-up numbers, and, after we have sorted your data, an assortment list per retailer.
LIST OF BRANDS AND THEIR LOGO ASSETS
An important list of information is the list of brands you deal in, and the logos of those brands. These logos, uploaded as pictures, are called ‘assets’. ‘Assets’ cover all forms of visual media that you might want to upload as extra information for your products – photos, videos, pdfs, etc. It is therefore important to have a list of all your available brands, together with the assets (logos) connected to those brands.
ASSETS AND THEIR FOLLOW-UP NUMBERS
Another important list is a list of the EAN codes of products, followed by their corresponding image (or asset), then they are more easily linked to the appropriate content and information. Therefore, it is useful to deliver a list of EAN codes with follow-up numbers and their representative image asset. For example, an item in the list will be registered with the EAN and the follow-up number: 8712861660027_01. In this case, ‘_01’ is the follow-up number. Following this number will be the appropriate asset. The EAN-number can then be used to look up the product to which the assets should be linked.
Only if assets are delivered in this way, can we start work on a bulk upload of images for your organisation.
AFTER RECEIVING YOUR INFORMATION
Based on the content we receive from you, our data team will create your data model. When creating a model, we decide which fields are necessary to create the best possible export per retailer.
When the data model is finished, we will import your delivered content and assets into our platform. With this, the ‘Master Data’ (all available content) is created. In our next call with your organisation, we will review our work, and advise what content is missing and has to be delivered or changed (think fields that have to be merged, information that has to be separated with commas, etc.). We will also explain what kind of fields retailers can receive and what changes have to be made to complete your data based on this information.
Examples of fields to fill out are:
The field ‘Title’, where the brand name, product description, and contents of the product are registered. This is the name by which the product will be searched by retailers and other organisations.
The field ‘Sub title’, which is a copy of the field ‘Title’, to be used by retailers who don’t wish to have the brand name and the net content of the product in the title. Therefore, only a product description is registered here.
We will go through all possible fields with you, and explain them all in detail. We will make sure that you fully understand the information you can deliver and that can be expected from you.
INFO: We will also explain the difference between ‘text fields’ and ‘rich text fields’. ‘Rich text fields’ can be filled with html. We will also explain the functions of our platform’s html-editor which will simplify filling out rich text fields.
MASTER DATA COMPLETE
If your organisation is happy with the master data at this point, our support team will then create the ‘export mappings’, with which it is decided which fields per product will be sent out to the retailers. The support team creates the best possible mapping to share as much information as possible with as many retailers as possible.
After this, the support team creates ‘variants’. Every retailer might need different information, and therefore, product variants are made per retailer to make sure they only receive compatible fields and data. These variants can be seen by you on the Retail platform, and we will go through them with you and ask you if they are up to standards. Possibly, we will ask you to deliver extra information if this is needed to complete the variants for export.
ASSORTMENT LIST PER RETAILER
An assortment list of products is very important. For this reason, we will ask you to deliver a list of all the products you have available, together with a list of the retailers that will receive the products. Usually, this is represented in an excel sheet with a checkmark in every appropriate retailer column per product (products being represented by their appropriate EAN-codes, or Hope code in the case of sharing information with Delhaize). Your organisation will not be selling all its available products to one retailer, and not all retailers will receive the same items from you.
An assortment list primarily consists of all EAN codes, and the connected product name (ex. 123456789 - Dishwasher). After performing the exports and sharing the appropriate data with the right retailers, we will discuss the results with your organisation.
TIME TO TRAIN
After the master data has been created and implemented, we will show you the functionalities of our platform in a comprehensive training session. We will show you how to easily make changes in the master data and in the information to and from potential retailers. We will show you how to keep assortments up to date, and anything else that can be useful for your organisation.
SUMMARY
What follows is a short step-by-step guide to summarise how the master data will be used:
An assortment list is created by you, which contains the EAN codes of all products which are sent to retailers. The list shows which products are sent to which retailers.
Using the assortment list, we create variants of the product data to be sent to the appropriate retailers. In the Retail platform, you can check the completeness score of every variant and add information, to make sure that the product information is delivered as complete as possible.
It is communicated to us by you that data information has to be sent to the appropriate retailers. It can also happen that the contact person of the appropriate retailer requests product information about the product assortment which is sold through their Webshop.
INFO: If products have a disclaimer as part of their information, this should always be added to the product data.
Most retailers will ask for a short description of around 200 characters. Otherwise, longer descriptions are usually desired.
In short: the onboarding process is a complete, high profile process that will quickly make you familiar with our platform and our capabilities. We look forward to working with you!