Product Content Quality: Kroger and Grainger Share Strategies To Transform Customer Experience and Drive Loyalty

Great content doesn’t just look good. It helps customers make confident buying decisions. 

In a world where online shoppers can’t pick up, touch, or try your products, product content is the customer experience. And now, that experience needs to be complete, consistent, and lightning fast to keep up with rising expectations.

That’s why content quality has become a top priority for ecommerce leaders. It directly impacts everything from search visibility to conversion rates to brand trust, and the pressure to get it right is only growing.

At Salsify's Digital Shelf Summit, hosted by Salsify and the Digital Shelf Institute (DSI), hundreds of ecommerce professionals gathered to tackle the biggest challenges on the digital shelf. 

One of the most insightful sessions featured Brooke Chambers, director of ecommerce at Kroger; Ahona Mazumder, manager of product information supplier syndication strategy at Grainger; and Kelly Rianda, senior director of retail success at Salsify.

Together, they explored how retailers and distributors are evolving their approach to content and why brands need to treat it as a strategic priority, not just a box to check.

Why Content Quality Matters More Than Ever

Shopping online is different from shopping in a store.  There’s no endcap display to catch your eye, no friendly store associate to answer questions, and no way to physically hold a product in your hand. Content is doing all the heavy lifting.

As Chambers from Kroger put it, “Your product page is your shelf.” 

Content quality is now a core driver of sales. It affects:

• How your product shows up in search;
• Customers’ confidence in clicking “buy,” and 
• How your brand is perceived. 

And as Chambers reminded the audience, customers aren’t just looking at price and shipping speed, they’re judging your product by how it’s presented. 

“Retail is a fight for customers right now,” she says. “Everyone is partners with everyone. So, how do you keep your customers digitally engaged? The foundation of that is content.”

For Grainger, this rings just as true, especially in the business-to-business (B2B) world. Mazumder shared that the products on Grainger.com help businesses keep running and people stay safe. So the product content needs to answer specific, often urgent questions, like, “What’s the load-bearing weight of this ladder? And will this belt fit my machine?”

If your content can’t answer a customer's question, they won’t buy. Whether it’s bananas or belts, content is what connects your product to your customer. That connection needs to be clearer, faster, and more complete than ever.

At Kroger: Creating a Content-Rich, Customer-Centric Experience

At Kroger, Chambers and her team are all-in on building a unified, omnichannel experience. 

Whether customers are shopping online for delivery, doing curbside pickup, or browsing in-store, Kroger wants to ensure the digital shelf accurately reflects the real-world experience, and that starts with content completeness.

One of the company’s key shifts is developing category-specific content standards, which Chambers described as “content by commodity” because, as she put it, “You sell a banana differently than you sell a potato chip.” 

Kroger is also rolling out a new content scoring system that provides suppliers with a clearer view of how their content compares. 

And there’s a bigger shift happening behind the scenes: an emphasis on contextualized, personalized shopping experiences. That means search and discovery are getting smarter, powered by accurate attribution and metadata. 

Chambers made the case that we’re moving into an era where traditional left-hand navigation may become obsolete. Without the right content and attribution, your product might not even show up.

At Grainger: Scaling Smart in the B2B World

Over in the B2B space, Mazumder faces a different kind of content challenge.

Grainger manages over 1.5 million products from over 3,000 suppliers, each with its own product specs, descriptions, and quirks. It’s no small feat to gather, organize, and publish all that data in a way that answers customer questions and builds trust.

Historically, Grainger relied on a very manual system: spreadsheets. Lots of spreadsheets.

Suppliers would fill them out and email them back, a process that was slow, clunky, and prone to errors. But times are changing. Now, Grainger is shifting toward automation and syndication to streamline things and make it easier for suppliers to work with them.

Mazumder described their new strategy as building a “supplier tool belt”, aka a flexible set of options that lets suppliers submit product content in ways that work for them. 

At the heart of this is a focus on validation rules, automation, and better integration with systems like Salsify, which make it easier to get accurate, usable content into Grainger’s ecosystem quickly.

To measure success, Grainger lives by what Ahona calls their “tattoo-worthy metrics:” accuracy, consistency, and completeness. For instance, if a product listing is missing key specs or the terminology isn’t consistent (think “gray” vs “grey”), customers can get confused or drop off entirely.

Practical Takeaways for Ecommerce Leaders

So, what can ecommerce leaders actually do with everything shared in this session? Whether you're a brand, manufacturer, or distributor, here are the key actions you should take to stay ahead of the content quality curve.

Don’t Fear Attribution

One of the strongest pieces of advice from Chambers was simple but powerful: Stop fighting attribution. 

Accurate, well-structured data helps your products show up in search, and that's how customers discover you. As she put it, shoppers don’t always search by brand anymore. Instead, they search for phrases like “chic white soup bowl” or “low-sugar almond milk.”

If your content doesn’t include the right attributes, you won’t appear in the results, no matter how great your product is. 

Invest in Content Governance

Mazumder from Grainger put it bluntly: Bad data in means bad data out. 

It doesn’t matter how slick your platform is if the foundational content isn’t clean, accurate, and complete; the customer experience falls apart.

Grainger is tackling this with clear validation rules, norming structures, and consistent standards for how data should look. 

Prioritize Speed to Market and Ease of Business

Both Grainger and Kroger emphasized the importance of making it easy for suppliers to submit and update product data. Mazumder talked about moving away from rigid spreadsheets to more flexible, automated systems, because nobody wants to get stuck in email ping-pong over a SKU.

View Retailers as True Partners

Chambers emphasized that relationships between brands and retailers should go beyond transactional. Want to test something new? Ask. Have ideas for improving the process? Share them. Interested in deeper alignment? Jump into joint planning conversations early.

Retailers want you to succeed. The ones leading the pack are building style guides, scoring systems, and internal tech tools specifically to help you grow. Get involved and use those tools.

Get Involved in Feedback Loops

Your voice really does have power. 

Speak up if something isn’t working for you or if you see an opportunity. Join advisory boards, send feedback, and make use of your retail success team. These channels are evolving fast, and your input could directly shape the next update, feature, or scoring system.

The Future of AI, Automation, and Product Content

Both Kroger and Grainger are actively investing in what’s next, and content is right at the center of their strategies.

Kroger is using artificial intelligence (AI) to support everything from category management to content enrichment. Chambers shared that one key area of focus is giving merchants better internal tools to make decisions faster, with better insights. Because, as she put it, “Category managers are the fuel behind driving sales.”

At Grainger, Mazumder is focused on making data collection smarter, not harder. That means:

• Offering more automated, API-driven integrations;
• Enhancing their Salsify channel; and
• Building a flexible “supplier tool belt” to meet partners wherever they are on their digital maturity journey.

But perhaps the most interesting point was this: We’re heading into a world where traditional navigation may disappear altogether. 

As AI reshapes how customers search and shop, Chambers suggested we might be saying goodbye to the left-hand filters we’ve relied on for years. Instead, shoppers will expect intuitive, dynamic search results that match their intent, not just keywords.

Keep Up With Shoppers’ Behaviors and Expectations

So what does this all mean for you? It means now is the time to future-proof your product content; get your attributes in order; embrace rich, layered data; and prepare for a more fluid, personalized, AI-powered shopping experience.

In other words, the way people shop is changing fast. If your content can’t keep up, your conversions won’t either.