E-commerce: managing complexity

Bridging the gap from data sources to e-commerce sites

Given the importance of quality data on e-commerce sites and the number of technologies that are touchpoints for the data, ensuring consistency is a top priority. Codifyd offers a product called Bridge that helps translate data from manufacturers into a format that can be ingested by product information management (PIM) systems for delivery to e-commerce sites. The company focuses on designing and building product content systems for B2B e-commerce sites.

“Distributors may be sourcing from thousands of manufacturers, all of whom are describing their products in different ways,” says Paul Jakaitis, VP of sales at Codifyd. “Bridge is an accelerator for PIMs, to normalize the data so it can be ingested and classified into categories that search can operate on.” The PIM sits between an enterprise resource planning solution, web content management system or digital asset management system to organize data into an electronic catalog.

“Without a PIM, a user might search on an attribute and find no associated data,” Jakaitis says. “In a virtual world, users are not interacting with a human who knows the product; they are trusting the site to provide the right metadata. It is becoming a critical topic that has been ignored for many years, and legacy systems are not designed to get it right.” PIMs began as a way to produce print catalogs, but they can also move data into marketplaces, sales tools or other venues; help with marketing automation; and track when a product becomes obsolete. A versatile product, the PIM is a behind-the-scenes linchpin for e-commerce.