At last year’s ‘Thanksgiving Day’ and ‘Black Friday’ in the US, online 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 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 that 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 earlier products.
The need of the hour is therefore a platform that allows 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 e-tailers, 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/e-tailers 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.
About GS1 India:
GS1 India is a standards organisation set up by the Ministry of Commerce and Industry, Government of India, along with CII, industry associations, Bureau of Indian Standards (BIS), and others. It is an affiliate of GS1®, a global standards organisation, headquartered in Brussels, which oversees operations of 112 GS1 organisations across the world.
Most commonly, GS1 standards are used in barcoding of consumer items, which enables important applications such as faster checkout at POS, product authentication, track & trace, product recall, real-time stocks monitoring, online selling, efficient cross border trade, and more.
GS1 India mission is to improve the efficiency, safety and visibility of supply chains across physical and digital channels through the use of global GS1 standards. By using the bar-coding, Indian manufacturers and traders can build up their productivity greatly.
Contributed by GS1