At this year’s ‘Thanksgiving Day’ and ‘Black Friday’ in the U.S., on-line shopping overshot sales through retail stores, reversing the shopping trend of earlier years.
With rapid proliferation of online shopping portals and expected expansion of modern retail trade market share from 10% to over 25% in the next few years, providing a seamless shopping experience to consumers becomes imperative.
It needs to be kept in mind that today’s hyper-connected consumer researches thoroughly for a product, both off-line and on-line before deciding to buy.
At the core of delivering a seamless, consistent experience across retail channels to the consumer is ready access to detailed information on retailed products which is accurate, complete, reliable and enables shoppers to make purchase decisions with ease.
Retailers/etailers struggle to get this right most often, with several instances of incomplete information or wrong depiction of products resulting in loss of consumer confidence.
Brand owners/suppliers too struggle with uploading their product information multiple times in proprietary buyer formats, resulting in frequent mismatches and gaps. This is particularly true since retail products undergo frequent changes with new products that are being introduced and phasing out of earlier products.
The need of the hour is therefore a platform which allows for seamless exchange and updation of information on products between trading partners in a uniform, structured and consistent manner, without requiring multiple data uploads.
This will significantly reduce current dependence of etailers, in particular, to crowd-sourced data that is usually highly unreliable, inaccurate and even malicious, at times.
GS1 India’s ‘DataKart’, created in response to Industry needs and with their active collaboration, fills this gap. This enables brand owners and retailers/etailers to exchange and update product information with accuracy, in real time, with no involvement of any third party.
Operative since 2016, DataKart currently hosts information on over 7 million retailed products across all categories with rich attribute information related to product images, label information etc.
