Delivering a winning digital shelf experience is critical to your commercial survival. Your customers decide which products to buy during a series of interactions made up of both online and in-store touch points. This digital shelf is omnichannel, with some customer journeys lasting minutes (for instance, the customer remembers they need milk, searches for the nearest grocer, visits the store, and buys the milk) — and others lasting months (for instance, the customer reads a cake recipe, researches ways to make the cake vegan, watches hours of frosting tutorials, clips coupons, reads comparison charts of almond versus oat milk in frosting, reads reviews, goes to the store, taste tests the products, asks questions on Twitter, searches the availability of the milk, conducts a price check, and finally buys the oat milk). Throughout this journey, consumers compare different options to find a product that meets their needs and expectations. The shopping experiences they have at each touch point will determine which brand and retailer ultimately get the sale.
Overcome Market Challenges to Deliver the Digital Shelf Experiences Customers Demand
Quick Start Menu
Report Navigation
The pandemic’s long-term impact
The non-linear omnichannel shopping journey
The value of building brand trust
Shoppers product page expectations
Take Action
Survey Methodology
The Nonlinear Omnichannel Shopping Journey
The Value of Building Brand Trust
Shoppers' Product Page Expectations
The Pandemic's Long-Term Impact
Breaking Down The Barriers to Winning Commerce
Table of Contents
The Line Between Brands and Retailers Has Blurred
Barriers to Commerce 1: Exchanging Data Is Costly
Barriers to Commerce 2: Operational Silos Within a Brand
Barriers to Commerce 3: Operational Silos Within a Retailer
The Way Forward: An Open World of Brand and Retailer Collaboration
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Every Touch Point Is an Opportunity
The Modern Shopping Journey Spans the Digital Shelf
Consider How a Hat Could Be Purchased in a Variety of Ways
Buy in store
Shoppers abandon potential online purchases and seek alternatives when they don’t find the right information — or as soon as an experience doesn’t meet their expectations.
Direct-to-consumer
Buy online, pick up in store
Buy online, ship to home
46%
46% of U.S. shoppers abandon if they don’t find relevant product information
56%
44%
44% of German shoppers abandon if they don’t find relevant product information
56% of French shoppers abandon if they don’t find relevant product information
46% of British shoppers abandon if they don’t find relevant product information
Source: 2022 Consumer Research, Salsify
As a retailer or brand manufacturer, you may have some visibility into a few of the actions that buyers take prior to a purchase, but there’s no reliable way to predict or control each moment along the nonlinear chain of events leading to this sale. Therefore, every touch point is an opportunity. The consumer journey is no longer predictable or easy to map. Most brand and marketing strategies are traditionally built around the idea that shoppers discover, consider, purchase, and then repeat that purchase — and eventually become loyal, regular shoppers over time. But search engines make it possible for shoppers to compare items and discover what they’re looking for on a single retailer’s results page. And direct buying from social media makes it possible for someone to find your product and ship it immediately. There are also Internet of Things (IoT) technologies that can be set to reorder parts or consumable goods with little consideration from the buyer.
In addition, there’s an endless aisle of alternatives for every item. Products need to:
Be easily discovered where the consumer is, the moment the need arises;
Win when evaluated on relevance, quality, price, and convenience compared to the competition; and
Deliver delightful experiences to earn continued loyalty post-sale. This cycle could last minutes, days, or months. With automated reordering options, your loyal customers can be a lot more valuable.
Customer Journey Stages
Discovery
Evaluation
Delivery
Does your product top the list for each relevant attribute a shopper wants?
• Search results • Advertisements • Social media • In-store shelves • Retailer site listings • Word of mouth • IoT recommendations • Subscription boxes
• Product page • Media coverage • Social media • Direct-to-consumer (DTC) website • Mobile apps • Customer review sites • In-store demos • 3D or AR demos
• Packaging • Delivery • Emails or SMS • Social media • Sales and customer team • Company website • Instructions or support materials
Product data and content are central components to a winning commerce experience on the digital shelf. In order to gain an edge in every commerce experience, your site must provide product attributes, images, descriptions, reviews, assortments, and availability information that is accurate, up-to-date, and compelling.
What Is Product Information?
Graphic Copy
Details for Design
• Materials or ingredients • UPC codes, part or product numbers, weights, and dimensions • Product specifications • Packaging images • Product titles and descriptions • Feature bullets • Rich media and videos • Alternate reality (AR) or virtual reality (VR) product views
• Include variables like “non-GMO” • Add visuals or relative sizing • Change with the season • Optimize for search for each sales channel • Adjust for consumer trends or review comments
Brands and retailers have been operating with an established set of roles for decades. Brands produced products, ran national campaigns to drive awareness, and paid to drive foot traffic to retail locations. Retailers owned the real estate, customer relationship, and experience. Much of this dynamic has changed. Now, every brand is becoming a retailer, managing its own merchandising strategy, dealing with customer relationship management (CRM), and often operating DTC channels. Meanwhile, many retailers are acting like brand manufacturers, given the rise of private-label products and third-party (3P) selling. As old operating models shift, it’s likely your organization is playing multiple roles in the process of getting products to market. Makers (or brands) know the product best and have a vested interest in protecting its market reputation and controlling manufacturing quality and cost. Sellers (or retailers) know their shoppers best and have a vested interest in providing the best assortment in a convenient, compelling way. Each role has a brand identity — the names, logos, and other marketing concepts that identify a particular company or product in the marketplace. In this world, brands and retailers mutually benefit from building relationships in which data and information are exchanged freely between parties. They need to move fast and in coordination to meet shopper demand. Winners emerge based on their ability to delight customers and shift promotional plans, product content, and product availability to capitalize on market trends. This requires an efficient way to collaborate on product information and share relevant product performance data.
Third-Party Models for Retailers to Source Content
A retailer might use the following content source options:
Walled Garden: An exclusive relationship between a retailer and a third party that intentionally blocks a brand’s own ability to work directly with the retailer. These exclusive third parties impede the transfer of data and agility in the market and ultimately degrade the consumer experience. A walled garden may charge a per-stock keeping unit (SKU) basis fee to a brand to send content to the retailers. These fines disincentivize brands from sending a full catalog of data or updating specific retailers when new content becomes available. Data Pool: A gateway in which all necessary information to perform business transactions between trading partners is exchanged in a standardized way. Data pools allow brands to upload product data and create subscriptions for recipients (usually retailers) to access that data. Unlike walled gardens, they improve retailers' access to the most up-to-date vetted content and make the process of onboarding multiple SKUs scalable. Global Data Synchronization Network (GDSN): The most commonly used network for commercial data pools. It provides a standard set of baseline product data across an entire product category. Retailers or channel partners pull the data from the GDSN-validated data pool into their own product information management solution to enrich specific endpoints. Peer-to-Peer Network: A platform that provides direct connectivity between the brand and its sales channel. These systems maintain information about endpoints — for example, retailers, resellers, marketplaces, and third-party search and marketing platforms — to help brands adapt and deliver content to match the specific taxonomies and content requirements of each endpoint. As a result, product data can be pulled by or pushed to the retailers directly from the brand.
Pros and Cons of Content Onboarding
Walled Garden
Model
Pros
Cons
• Requires limited internal resources from retailers
• Siloed data • Minimal visibility into the process Creates friction between brands and retailers • Lack of transparency • Duplicative costs that can result in lower-quality data
Data Pool
• Allows for the most customized data • Feedback and increased transparency between brands and retailers
• Less personalized • Potential gaps or additional needs for data enrichment
Peer-to-Peer Network
• A standardized and scaled approach to data
• Requires a technology commitment from the retailer
Where Walled Gardens Exist
Many brands spend upwards of $100K to simply send product content to retailers. And unlike trade marketing and promotional spending, these investments do not spur sales growth. Instead, these tolls merely feed an outdated industry model built for a world that assumed that manufacturers didn’t have access to high-quality product data, to take the fast-moving consumer goods (FCMG) category as an example. This added complexity slows time to market, saps budgets, and disincentivizes frequent updates of product content. Brands that must pay each time they send a SKU may only prioritize a subset of their catalog or wait for substantial changes rather than update content frequently.
Market Leaders Have Evolved Beyond Walled Gardens
Many brands spend upwards of $100K to simply send product content to retailers. And unlike trade marketing and promotional spending, these investments do not spur sales growth. Instead, these tolls merely feed an outdated industry model built for a world that assumed that manufacturers didn’t have access to high-quality product data, to take the fast-moving consumer goods (FCMG) category as an example. Walmart sought to source and coordinate product content from its suppliers to build a deep and meaningful customer experience on its shopping platforms. Walmart’s API allows brands to get their product content live on Walmart.com in seconds instead of months. With this process and set of technical capabilities in place, Walmart rolled out a program for all of its product suppliers, asking for a specific set of digital product content in 2015. .
Learn how Walmart developed an API to help suppliers automate content.
In addition to the external barriers to transparent and agile collaboration, many brand manufacturers face an additional set of internal barriers. Organizational structures and operating models that worked well before the digital shelf now prevent teams from working together at the required speed. While brand manufacturers have different company structures specific to their needs, there are two common operational silos — one in marketing and another in operations — that can hold back a company’s ability to provide a winning commerce experience.
Evaluate digital shelf readiness for your brand.
TAKE ASSESSMENT
Break the Barrier Between Trade and Brand Teams
Marketing promotions and ad budgets have traditionally been handled by different teams — and for good reason. Brand teams provided air cover, focusing on telling the story of the product by building awareness through large-scale ad buys and product positioning. In contrast, trade teams focused on each sales channel. When customer journeys are predictable, it makes sense to create demand by running local promotions and strengthening performance where needed. Allocating small trade marketing budgets allows sales teams to build influence with each retail customer they have and make an impact in the markets that matter most to their bottom line. But the influence of marketing is not as straightforward on the digital shelf; shoppers can discover and buy on the same touch point, or they may visit multiple touch points that all influence the sale. Many shoppers search for the lowest price across multiple retailers. Others may research online but buy in-store.
Here’s an example of silos that are created.
In this example, the retail management team within the sales organization controls a majority of the spending, while the team responsible for ecommerce is siloed under a chief marketing officer (CMO) with minimal budget. Channel planning creates harmful silos and omits important information about factors impacting the overall bottom line. For example, running a promotion on one channel may automatically reduce prices across the entire ecosystem. Strategies meant to fuel ecommerce growth on one retailer platform can trigger an in-store purchase at another retailer. These separations can create conflicting key performance indicators (KPIs), gaps in funnel activation, and improvement strategies built on an incomplete picture of the total performance. Brands need the ability to pivot strategies quickly in the face of change. For example, knowing where to rebalance ad spend based on market results, and determining where to spend incremental budget so that it influences those channels that are driving the most growth, can be critical. As each shopper continues to have broader access to any promotion or campaign that’s running, brand teams should work from the same centralized source of product information — and adjust promotional strategies and advertising with a view towards maximizing total growth.
Adopt Total Growth Accountability With 4 Strategies
1. Integrate and Centralize Decision-making Across Teams
Consumers switch channels frequently. Balance short-term conversion goals with long-term brand building. Measure by share of voice and sales on important channels to compare to competitors’ performance. Prioritize a seamless brand experience across all touch points for shoppers.
2. Adopt Strategies for Price Matching
Consumers search for the lowest price, and retailers may automatically adjust pricing for marketplace third-party sales. Assume the lowest price somewhere will be the new price everywhere. Be deliberate with your assortment or retailer item exclusivity to protect margin and avoid unintended algorithm-driven price fluctuations.
3. Manage Product Portfolios
Optimize your product portfolio across product, pack, price, and profitability for both shoppers and retailers. Capture growth and share with retailer-specific exclusive products. Create digital experiences for lower-volume products to niche consumer groups. Detect hyper-local product preferences and programmatically cue local retailers to add corresponding SKUs.
4. Provide Budget Fluidity Across the Team
With constant marketplace change, gain a first-mover advantage by acting on insights in real-time. Set longer-term value outlooks and short-term reallocation budgets. Review and reallocate the budget frequently with sales and marketing stakeholders. Allow flexibility to move funds between retailers or channels to seize moment-in-time opportunities.
Break the Barrier Between Front-End Operations and Back-End Operations
In a world where product orders are processed and shipped by individual retailers, a brand supplier’s priority is to ensure each sales partner gets the inventory they ordered on time and in good condition. The back-end warehouse team can rely on getting sales shipping requests, and manage inventory and shipping by the pallet rather than by the case or per individual sale. Likewise, a sales team can focus on securing large orders from a retailer and have long time frames to plan for inventory needed to run a discount promotion or sale event. The supply chain is a weapon and a liability in the digital world, where being out of stock of a certain item for hours could reduce sales for months due to a decreased search ranking. Everyone is shipping eaches and pallets now. Although you may be able to offer an endless aisle of products online, the physical realities of any warehouse require you to understand your inventory levels well enough to make strategic promotion choices. Providing a shared source of inventory and supply data across your front-end and back-end teams can help you stay agile in these new market conditions. Real-time inventory of eaches and real-time channel reallocation of inventory are critical to your success.
4 Advantages Gained With Inventory and Go-to-Market Operations Alignment
1. The Flexibility to Sell DTC
Two market changes have driven brand manufacturers to evaluate providing direct ecommerce as a strategic advantage on the digital shelf. First is the impact of vertical native DTC brands. From razors to shoes to beverages, these upstart brands have disrupted traditional retail categories and threatened the dominance of long-standing brands. Second is the increase in online marketplaces. Shoppers can now encounter third-party listings for brand items, raising the stakes for brands that don’t monitor or compete directly with these listings on these sites. Selling on a marketplace often requires the ability to manage orders and shipments directly.
2. Avoidance of Out-of-Stock Sales Losses
With the growth in options for ordering and delivery comes increased pressure on staying in stock on every channel. Having products go out of stock not only results in the loss of a potential sale but can also create poor customer experiences with your brand, lead to a loss of ad investments if you or your retail customer are spending money to drive traffic to an out-of-stock item, and eventually result in a search ranking decrease on a retailer’s site. Many retailers adjust their search results based on sales results, so an item that is out of stock will actively reduce your product’s ability to be discovered by future buyers. Brands can address these potential losses by monitoring inventory levels on each channel and establishing a clear set of actions to take when items are low in stock. These actions should include contacting the warehouse team to restock, reaching out to the customer to address the inventory issue on their channel, and alerting the ad or go-to-market team to adjust or halt any ongoing promotions that involve the out-of-stock channel.
3. More Flexibility To Test and Learn on New Sales Channels
Commerce exists in more places than ever before: direct stores on social media, pop-up stores in high-foot-traffic areas, two-hour delivery options from the back of ride shares, and more. It’s difficult to predict where the next sales opportunity might come from, but it’s even more challenging to determine how much investment to make in a new sales channel. Brands that create a collaborative, transparent way for go-to-market and inventory management teams to work together can better navigate new opportunities as they arise. A shared set of metrics around product availability, costs of entry, and actual demand generated can enable teams to launch quick tests and pilots to determine which channels have sales potential for their product catalogs.
4. A Clearer Picture of Total Demand
Overall, having your go-to-market teams and inventory teams share operational data creates a large-scale record of which channels work best for generating product demand and which channels lead to product orders. This data not only helps with daily operations but can also be used to inform product development, competitive strategies, and marketing budget allocations on a quarterly basis.
LEARN MORE
Learn more about inventory management for the digital shelf.
Like brands, retailers face their own set of barriers within their companies’ walls. Operating hierarchies and budgeting processes that worked well in the past now need to be reexamined under the shifting demands of the digital shelf. There’s unprecedented pressure on retailers to provide a larger product assortment — across a larger number of touch points — all while maintaining an experience that’s seamless and personally relevant from the shopper’s point of view. While every retailer has its own approach to organizational structure, its own set of legacy technologies to adapt, and a unique shopping experience that differentiates them from competitors, there are two common roadblocks — one in IT and one in points of sale — that often prevent the agility necessary to win consistently on the digital shelf.
IT used to own data and any related issues and could quickly become a bottleneck for teams — like procurement, channel managers, CSR, and ecommerce — that needed quick access to product data. The IT department serves the entire organization. They are constantly putting out fires and making decisions about which enhancements to the company’s overall tech stack are necessary to protect current business operations and prepare for future needs. Complete data control makes sense when that data is about weights, measures, and technical specifications. However, when data includes the shopper's commerce experience, data control must be a shared responsibility, allowing suppliers to contribute directly to constantly changing product information. Supplier onboarding technology may be just one of several projects in the request queue for an IT department; this function serves as a critical foundation for all your go-to-market success. A reliable and agile system to collect, enrich, validate, and publish supplier product information gives retailers a strategic advantage to merchandise effectively in a world of constant change and shifting demands. A product’s digital listings drive the entire sales lifecycle. By ensuring better communication between these teams, organizations can prioritize basic item onboarding, which can then drive the remaining sales, CRM, inventory management, and billing initiatives.
Break the Data Barriers Between IT and Other Functions
Break the Barrier Between POS Channels
6 Benefits of Investing in Technology That Supports Your Suppliers
1. Strengthen Your Product Assortment
Better item set-up features enable suppliers to provide you with more product SKUs and the data that supports your channel management teams’ needs earlier in the product sourcing process. Many retailers create systems that can initially vet products for certain attributes or help to categorize items upfront, which makes merchandising easier.
2. Reduce Your Time to Market
The more streamlined the process of getting items set up and published to your sales channels, the faster your team can begin selling. Efficient supplier onboarding portals increase a product’s time in market. This not only improves the return you and your supplier see on the product, but it also gives you an advantage against other retailers who might be slower to go to market with similar brand items.
3. Eliminate or Decrease Your IT Ticket Queue
Chances are your IT team gets a number of troubleshooting requests related to product information — from accessing the right information to supporting suppliers directly to a need for additional data enrichment to file formatting. Depending on your legacy system setup, your IT team might be supporting each channel’s data needs in a more manual way than is necessary. By improving your team's ability to store, manage, and enrich product data directly, you can reduce the number of one-off requests for data access and eliminate any manual work your team has taken on.
4. Reduce Your Returns
Consumers return products when these items don’t meet their expectations. By improving your supplier onboarding, you can improve your product listings and increase the amount of information your shoppers can see. Many retailers use product validation rules and governance to help channel and category owners directly oversee the accuracy and quality of what goes on the site, and track patterns across any product pages that are seeing a disproportionate number of returns.
5. Improve Your Conversion Rates
On the digital shelf, shoppers use the images, videos, 360-degree image spins, and support materials they find to evaluate products. Your suppliers are the best source of this engaging content — but you need to ensure that your systems can collect and publish it across each point of sale (POS). Many retailers see a conversion rate improvement when suppliers provide this enhanced content, anywhere from 10% to 36% per SKU. Some retailers use this as an additional paid promotion opportunity in which their brands can invest. Others provide open enhanced content channels for any supplier with the content necessary to supply it, which can provide an overall larger share of product pages with this engaging content on your sales channels.
6. Improve Your Relationships With Suppliers
All these benefits result in an improved relationship with suppliers. Today, brands have a wide array of retailers to choose to work with and often must prioritize the level of investment and energy they will provide each retailer. By offering an easy-to-use transparent portal for your supplier, you increase the ease with which they can provide you with their best content assets. Suppliers who have access to an onboarding system that doesn’t charge a premium to use and doesn’t require lots of manual labor are more likely to update their product content.
Traditionally, each sales channel at a retailer has had its own promotional budget, sales targets, and product assortment priorities. But your shopper doesn’t buy based on the sales channel; they browse, compare, and purchase where it’s most convenient for them.
Ecommerce Investment History
Retailers Have Invested Differently in Ecommerce Over Time
As you meet consumer demand for an increasing number of touch points, it becomes more difficult to know how to attribute sales influence or track the buyer’s journey. Many retailers are investing in loyalty programs and mobile apps to improve shopper habit tracking, but shopper adoption of these services will dictate the degree to which these retailers are getting the broad picture of consumer behavior. Retailers need to adopt a centralized vision of total growth to fully understand the influence of each POS activity because shoppers now have broader access to any promotion or campaign that’s running.
Balance short-term sales goals with long-term customer-building goals. Get a sense of your overall performance by measuring your share of voice and sales compared with other retailers in your market by category. Look at the total numbers alongside any channel-specific data you analyze.
Shoppers expect a consistent experience regardless of the channel they use to discover, browse, or buy. Create a shared source of product information, inventory information, and shopper data that channel teams can access and manage.
Set longer-term value outlooks and short-term reallocation budgets. Review and reallocate the budget frequently with channel lead stakeholders. Allow flexibility to move funds between channels to seize moment-in-time opportunities and react as the market shift.
In today’s world of infinite shelf space and consumer-driven search, legacy technologies and processes built for a slow physical shelf with limited assortments must be replaced. Retailers require cross-supply chain workflows and analytics to enable rapid onboarding and collaboration at scale across hundreds or thousands of suppliers. Brands need technology that supports managing and delivering channel-optimized data and workflows to all commerce touch points from a single source of truth, enabling them to create unique and continuously optimized experiences. Both parties succeed by removing friction across the supply chain, reducing time to market, and enabling cross-functional (and now cross-supply chain) collaboration at scale to customers. As product content improves to better support shoppers’ evolving requirements and purchase decisions, a marketplace is created in which brands, retailers, and distributors are winning more conversions together. Rapid collaboration and workflow-driven content updates across enterprises and teams are crucial to win on the digital shelf.
Request a guided demo of the Salsify CommerceXM Platform to see how it could help you overcome these barriers to commerce to deliver the digital shelf experiences shoppers demand.
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3 New Commerce Challenges Stand in Your Way
The approach may seem simple: Gather everything there is to know about every product you sell and make this information accessible everywhere shoppers will look. But experienced brands and retailers know that basic supplier onboarding and item setup, let alone ongoing refresh and optimization, has never been that straightforward. There are dozens of variables along the way — from the information each retailer requires of a brand; to the sources of product information a retailer might use to validate product claims; to the technology that collects, validates, edits, and delivers the information; to changing regulatory reporting requirements around allergens and supply chain transparency. The digital shelf only exacerbates that pain because of its complexity, automation, and accelerated pace of change.
1. Digital Shelf Complexity Has Increased
Shopping happens everywhere. Competition and product selection is virtually endless. If your product assortment is not available where, when, and how a shopper wants to see it, they will buy an alternative.
2. Algorithms Power Online Marketing
Many retailers use automated calculations to determine product placement or price. A product might be missing from the first page of results, or an item might be sold below the minimum advertised price (MAP) by a third party. In these cases, both brands and retailers need to be able to adjust promotions, product availability, and product content in real-time to seize new opportunities and avoid costly out-of-stock events.
3. Change Is Constant
New channels, new assortment details, and other disruptive market events change buyer behaviors. Your competitors are testing and innovating how they sell, and every new experience raises a shopper’s expectations. You can’t freeze or standardize innovation on experience. It’s a moving target. Whether shopping for themselves or their business, a shopper wants the best experience, and their expectations are constantly rising to meet their previous best experience. You need a way to track changes in the marketplace and look across industries to adjust to new trends in shopping outside of your area of expertise. You also need a method through which to test and learn on emerging channels without overcommitting your current resources.
The exchange of product information from brand to retailer is central to the success of omnichannel commerce. Many traditional item onboarding systems were built for an offline world. Some traditional vendors rely on exclusive contracts and charge both the brands and retailers a fee for little more than sending product data. Other paid arrangements include mandatory content creation that’s sometimes duplicative to the brand’s existing content. These tolls add additional go-to-market expenses without providing value to brands and retailers. Retailers need content from suppliers to list products for sale. For example, to put a product in a print circular, a retailer needs an image of the product, the product title, the price, and other basic information. Similarly, to put a product into a shelf-planning system, a retailer needs all of the above — plus a full set of compliant planogram images. While the traditional business model outsourced the complexity of collecting and validating product information from a retailer’s suppliers, today’s digital shelf requires more transparency and agility. Brands and retailers can no longer afford to pay fees to intermediaries that don’t add value and end up increasing time to market.
Breaking Down the Barriers to Winning Commerce
Every Touch Point is an Opportunity
Buy in-store
Buy Online, ship to home
Product data and content are central components to a winning commerce experience on the digital shelf. In order to gain an edge in every commerce experience, your site must provide product attributes, images, descriptions, reviews, assortments, and availability information that is accurate, up to date, and compelling.
What is Product Information?
Many brands spend upwards of $100K to simply send product content to retailers. And unlike trade marketing and promotional spending, these investments do not spur sales growth. Instead, these tolls merely feed an outdated industry model built for a world that assumed that manufacturers didn’t have access to high-quality product data, to take the fast-moving consumer goods (FCMG) category as an example. This added complexity slows time to market, saps budgets, and disincentivizes frequent updates of product content. Brands that must pay each time they send a SKU may only prioritize a subset of their catalog or wait for substantial changes rather than update content frequently Walmart sought to source and coordinate product content from its suppliers to build a deep and meaningful customer experience on its shopping platforms. Walmart’s API allows brands to get their product content live on Walmart.com in seconds instead of months. With this process and set of technical capabilities in place, Walmart rolled out a program for all of its product suppliers, asking for a specific set of digital product content in 2015. .