Content Optimization with 1WorldSync

[00:00:00] Stacy: Hello, hello. my name is Stacy. I lead the Retail Insights team here at SupplyPike. Been with the company now for four, going on five years soon, later this year. and I have a, you know, worked in the supplier industry for about a decade before joining the company. and at SupplyPike, my team's job is essentially to make sure that we are helping our customers. 
 

Our supplier partners, make the most out of their, out of working with SupplyPike, sharing insights, best practices across the industry. and that's one of the reasons why we're always so excited to work with partners like 1WorldSync because they have a true finger on the pulse of what's going on. I'm joined today by Randy Mercer. He's the chief product officer at OneWorldSync. Randy, did you want to do a super quick intro as well? 
 

[00:00:47] Randy: Yeah, sure. So, have been with OneWorldSync for little over 10 years. and of course running, running product direction and strategy. So making sure our platforms do as much as they can for our customers. 
 

I would just call out, I've been in this space for a long time. So with this company 10 years, but I've been in this space for about 20, with the benefit of having a lot of what we're going to talk about. Having seen it evolve over the years. So just always to share, happy to share what we see in the industry and hope that it helps the people that have taken their time to join the webinar today. 
 

[00:01:19] Stacy: Awesome. Thank you, Randy. so yeah, quick rundown of our agenda this morning. we are going to be talking a little bit and starting us off with what is content optimization. from there, we're going to talk a little bit about the good, better, and best of content optimization. I'm very excited to kind of learn more about that. 
 

We all know content is the name of the game, especially recently. and then we're going to spend a little bit of time discussing, how you can avoid the pitfalls of content optimization. And then at the end, we'll open it up with a more general Q& A session with both Randy and myself. so please, you guys, feel free to kind of throw questions, in the Q& A portion, and we'll be answering those throughout the webinar, but we'll also have a portion at the end of today's, discussion to make sure we can address all of the questions that you guys have. 
 

So please feel free to, to throw those, there. And how, you may ask, do you actually ask those questions? so A couple of ways. The first way is you can utilize the chat function that is for any sort of just general discourse. If you guys have insights that you want to share or stories that you've experienced or just general things that you want to share with the larger group, you can use that chat function. 
 

It's kind of that single speech bubble at the bottom of the Zoom window. You can also utilize the Q& A portion. It's got those two speech bubbles. If you have a very specific question, I recommend using that. It's just a little bit easier on our end to keep track of all the questions. And I can make sure that I'm sending them Randy's way, and keeping them a little bit more organized. 
 

one other quick call out that I wanted to share with you guys. We always get asked, will you get a copy of the slide deck? yes, you will. We will send the slide deck as well as a recording of today's webinar, to the email address that you signed up for the webinar with. and usually we can get that done in about three to four business days. 
 

So don't stress too much about having to take too many notes or anything like that. We'll make sure that you get this in your inbox in a couple of days. Okay, so last thing before we dive into the fun content, we always like to do super quick introductions of our companies. Again, in case you guys haven't been to one of our webinars before. 
 

But who is SupplyPike? We are a software company. I kind of mentioned earlier, we're based in Northwest Arkansas and our bread and butter, what we do every day is we help CPG partners reduce revenue loss, specifically by detecting and resolving retailer compliance, and AP deductions issues. So if you guys are not getting paid in full, if you're getting hurt with OTIF or SQEP compliance fines or anything like that, we help to automate the recovery process for that. 
 

We work with about 500 companies today, representing about 50. Billion dollars in retail impact across 50 different product categories. and across the screen are just a couple of the brands that we work with today. Proud to consider part of the Supply Pike Family. And Randy, did you wanna do a super quick intro on 1WorldSync? 
 

[00:04:14] Randy: Sure. Yeah. So we are a, a platform that sits between CPG brands.~~ Uh, ~~and retailers. And what we do for those folks is we, we help the brands with all things related to the concept of providing the retailers with every piece of content needed to ultimately merchandise a product. So, everything related to just making the supply chain work, shipping, warehousing, that kind of stuff. all the way up to the digital experience and the types of content that you can, contribute to that to make sure that you're optimized, optimizing those retail.work with, 15 or so thousand, brands today. So pretty good cross section folks. See a few of those. at the bottom, some of the retailers, there as well. So, that's us in a nutshell. 
 

[00:04:57] Stacy: Awesome, awesome. Okay, well, enough kind of giving you guys a little bit of background. Oh, sorry, one last slide. Promise it's the last one. Just wanted to share that this is part three of a free three part webinar series. that SupplyPike and OneRoltSync have done together. you will be able to access the recordings as well as the slide decks for both of the webinars that we did previously around content creation and content management and delivery, on SupplierWiki. 
 

So if you just Google SupplierWiki.com, it should lead you right there. And again, you can watch those recordings on demand and as well as download those slide decks. Okay. I will officially stop talking now, hand the baton over to you, Randy, to take us away talking about content optimization. 
 

[00:05:38] Randy: Okay. All right. So just, just, building on that last slide relative to those last two webinars. If you didn't see them, go back and take a look. Super compelling content there. But in both of those, webinars, the first one we talked about just where does content come from and how do you just, you know, get it very efficiently and sustainably. 
 

And the second one we talked about how do you manage that content that you now have because you're creating it so efficiently. And then ultimately, how do you deliver it out into the retail landscape to make sure that it's getting used, effectively as possible. In both of those webinars, we spoke to the concept that, that the creation and management content is not a one time thing. 
 

You know, just create it, send it out to retailers and, and then just, forget about it and, and go off and do something else. What we talked about is the concept of optimization. So, what we know about content is it changes constantly, especially in the CPG space where products are constantly getting repackaged for a variety of reasons, seasonality just being one of those food products very, very commonly being reformulated. Folks having to respond to, you know, regulations around what they have to show on the package. So the net of that is constant changes to the content. that, there's work involved in that, but it also is an opportunity to, while you're updating your content, make sure you're doing things to optimize how it's performing for you when you send it out into, into the, the, the retail channels. 
 

so on the slide here, we'll read that verbatim, but we talked a little bit about consistency across all channels. I'll get into that, but we did talk about that in the last webinar as well. if you're going to a ton of work to invest in your content, you may as well use it everywhere you possibly can. 
 

So key to that, you know, get it in a platform that you can, you know, service lots of different digital properties or, or use cases to make sure you're getting as much out of that investment. That lower paragraph there, relative to the, just this continuous feedback that a brand can get today, based on how his content is getting used. 
 

We'll talk about what are some of those things he can tell you how you're getting content. Is getting used, but an aspect of that today is, is user generated content, right? So customers or consumers writing reviews, you know, telling us about, you know, what they're seeing on the screen, what they're, you know, what they think about the products that they're buying. 
 

So all of those things, ultimately loop back to this concept of just optimizing your content, using all these channels of feedback that you have, that ultimately are going to result in selling more stuff, which is what we're all here to do. I'm going to talk about. this thing called optimization in a few different, aspects. 
 

starting with the, and we call it good, better, best, you can maybe think of these in a different order depending on, on, what your needs are, but, you know, we talk to consumers a lot, in our business to understand how consumers are changing the relative to their expectations of content, you know, what they see online as well as how that contributes to their in store shopping experience, right? 
 

And then we take that back and try to reconcile that against the different things that you can do to ultimately optimize your content. And I'm going to talk about three of those. Starting with content scorecards, you know, just something that just, you know, keeps, keeps your finger on the pulse of is your content just at bare minimum meeting the needs of the marketplace. 
 

We'll talk a little bit about what we think of, think of as retail e commerce, commerce analytics, right? So analytics that tell us some things that are happening in the e commerce, space that we can, once we know about them, we can address them, improve our performance. And then below the fold maximization, again, I'll get into that a lot here in a few slides, but essentially, when you look at something online, at the top of the screen, you see an image carousel and some basic information about the product. 
 

But if you scroll down, and we think of that as below the fold content, anything that you see when you're scrolling down that page, What are the opportunities that you have to engage the consumer, consent conversion, and then learn things about how you can just continue to do better and better at that. 
 

We'll get into that here shortly as well. So just starting out with content scorecards. And we talked about this in the last webinar when we talked about management, where one of the things that we talked about is just get all of your content in one place, right? And we see that. A lot, a challenge for brands is the fact that they have content in all kinds of different systems internally, digital asset management systems, product information management systems, PLMs, warehouse managers, all these things, content, you know, splattered all over their organization. 
 

And so we talk about just get it in one place, find a platform, a tool, something to just aggregate it all so that your internal users have one view of it, and when you think about now sending it out to do its job out into the marketplace. You've got a place to control that. So, always just a great place to start, find one place, whether you build it yourself, whatever that is, find a place to do that. 
 

One of the things that you can do once you have it in one of those places, again, something on, you know, a SaaS platform, a tool that you install, something you build yourself, once you have it in one place, it becomes much easier to just scorecard it. Just very easily identify what's missing on what item so that you can set about just making sure that everything is populated very consistently. 
 

You know, crazy enough in the CPG space, we have a lot of, a lot of food customers, so food manufacturers, we very commonly see things like nutritionals and ingredient strings, just not in their content. you'd think it'd just be just table stakes for some folks. They're not thinking enough about it, or they just don't have their content in one place where they could score it and recognize where we're missing it and where we're not. 
 

So that aspect of it. The next thing, two way messaging, what we're talking about there is just collaboration between the brand and the retailer. So if you're in a platform or a tool that enables that, great, right? Because without that collaboration, it becomes a very clunky exercise to, to respond to maybe deficiencies in your content. 
 

As judged by the retailer, right? So you think it's great, but you send it to the retailer and they say, ah, you're missing this, wish you would have done this differently. And if they've got to make a phone call or email or something that just goes off the rails, right? So think really hard about how you can collaborate with retailers as efficiently as possible. 
 

And then this, this last piece about internal knowledge share. So last webinar, we talked about in addition to sending your content to retailers. There are lots of people internal to your organization that desperately need visibility to that content as aggregated in one place, right? So, you can make them go look in the Digital Asset Management System, the PIM application, the PLM, all that kind of stuff. 
 

If you want to make them work for it, they can. They can go find it or you can just give it to them in one place. Once you have that, it's amazing how much feedback your salespeople, just as an example, will give you about your content, right? Cause they're the ones that get better dealing with that retailer relationship. 
 

They know if it goes out in bad shape, they're going to hear about it. So as a proactive measure, trust me, they're going to tell you where you could improve some things. And just use that internal feedback mechanism for your selfish benefit to improve your content so that, just the whole thing works a little bit better. So, as a, you know, we refer to it as good as a starting point. Those are some things that we would just recommend. we see brands doing it all the time. So, things to think about, if you want to just start to improve, how you're thinking about that content. 
 

[00:12:56] Stacy: So I think that makes a lot of sense, Randy. Quick, quick question for you just to kind of help contextualize it for our attendees. So who usually owns kind of this? It is a project, it is an initiative, kind of making sure you're pulling everything in one place and keeping it updated, which I think is kind of the key here. who typically in an organization will own something like this? 
 

[00:13:19] Randy: Yeah, it's a great question and it, and it varies, often depending on maybe the size of the CPG brand, or sometimes the number of SKUs. So maybe you're not a huge organization, but you just, your product just. It requires lots of SKUs, right? So what that all leads to ultimately is just the level of scale that is represented in, in this practice of managing, you know, creating, managing, sharing, and optimizing your content. 
 

So we see it range from a person, maybe it's a master data person, but their job is to ultimately get it pulled together and sent down into the marketplace. Sometimes that means they're the same person that's having to track down what's missing, you know, track down somebody to fix what's wrong, that kind of stuff. 
 

So sometimes it's, it's one person. But when you get into maybe an organization that has a little bit more scale where one person just cannot do it, you know, then you might have a master data person, you might have a marketing person, maybe somebody that's more in tune to the logistics aspects of the product. 
 

And what we talked about last time is when you get into those scenarios where it's not just one person, multiple people, and they all have to be involved at very specific times in the process. We talked about use a tool that helps you create some workflows, right? Some technology that can help keep people involved in the right time to make sure that it works as efficiently as possible and they can all just do their job the best they can without having to constantly be checking in to see, is it time for me to kick in or not? So it's a great question. 
 

[00:14:42] Stacy: Okay, now that makes a lot of sense. Thank you, Randy. 
 

[00:14:46] Randy: So, on the previous slide, you know, we really just talked about some of those foundational aspects of, you know, how you think about understanding where you can improve your content, getting that done, right, just as a basic framework for doing this really well. 
 

Ultimately, you're going to end up with your content out into the marketplace, and it's going to start appearing on retail websites. And you're going to sell something. And that something can range for not as much as you want, to maybe a little bit more than that. And we want to get it to selling as much as you possibly can, through that channel. 
 

So for that, what we see brands doing today is using a tool. we think of it as digital shelf analytics. we call it retail ecommerce analytics. in terms of our solutions, but what those solutions are intended to do is just help you as a brand understand how are you performing online, right? 
 

There's other ways you can do it. If you want to manually go out and look at every one of your products on every digital property that it shows up on, you can. But when you get to a point of scale, right? Lots of SKUs across lots of stores, let's say. that gets really difficult to do. So to use some tool that can help you just understand some very basic things, about what's happening online, can really go a long way toward your knowing about problems that if you solve them, you're going to sell more stuff. 
 

A few examples of that are price discrepancies, right? So, Let's say you're selling through a thousand stores. Pricing across those stores can sometimes vary depending on a number of different factors, but at the store level, they have the ability to change that price. So how do you know that your, your product is priced the way you think it should be, or at least consistently across those stores, if you don't have a tool to tell you that you could have. 
 

You know, a hundred stores priced the way you want and maybe a few more stores that have some crazy pricing that's just blatantly wrong. Maybe it's way overpriced, which means you're not selling any of it. And it's probably a mistake. Some merchandiser maybe, you know, did something that affected that and nobody knows, right? 
 

Until we call your attention to it with some tool that looks at that for you, right? So just an example of something that Again, manually, it's just really hard to keep tabs on, on some of those things, those pricing anomalies that can occur that, again, not intentional, you know, sometimes maybe there's a reason, rarely there is, and it's just something, if you know about it, you can fix it, start selling again, when, without knowing about it, you can't. 
 

Keyword search performance. when you think of going on any e com site today, you type in some stuff and it gives you some search results, right? What you type in, the keywords that you type, you know, sometimes it's just keywords that just are innate to your thinking in terms of what you're looking for. 
 

Sometimes it's seasonality. I mean, there's all kinds of things that come into that, but at the end of the day, if you type in some, or a consumer types in some keywords and your product does not come up in the top 10, guess what? They're probably never even going to see it. So, if we can tell you where you're falling in that search performance based on the keywords that we know consumers are using today. 
 

Ultimately, we can tell you what you should go back and improve your content with in terms of the keywords included in your marketing copy and things like that, that ultimately are going to make sure you fall in the top of that list and the consumer's actually going to find your product. 
 

[00:18:08] Stacy: Just a quick question, Randy, this is more for my to learn a little bit. So you mentioned kind of the keywords really depending, it can change by day almost. Like, is that, what cadence does that typically Is it folks having to change? I know like TikTok can make a certain thing surge, I'm sure. But are people having to go in and change their description every day, every week, every month? You know, when TikTok goes viral, like what does that usually look like? 
 

[00:18:39] Randy: Yeah, there's, you know, it, it, it depends. It varies by product category and even specific product to some extent. But, but yeah, the closer you keep tabs on that, the better because of things like just seasonality, you know, the things that are top in mind in terms of keywords at Christmas are different than those of Halloween. 
 

Right. So it's, it's true. I mean, people use different keywords because they're kind of thinking about different things. But just something current, like March Madness, right? I guarantee you, you know, people are, there's, there's just elements of those current events that come into the things that they think about typing in relative to a product. 
 

So again, there's some foundational things relative to the category of your product. and, and those types of fact based elements of keywords that, you know, are going to cover you a lot, but to be really tuned into just that constant change. Promotions that are out there, just all kinds of things can affect that. So it's something to stay really on top of. 
 

[00:19:31] Stacy: That's interesting. 
 

[00:19:32] Randy: That's very interesting.Yeah, so just, just moving on, you know, when you, when you've got a handle on your own search performance, often what you're, what you're grading that against is how your competitors are doing. So if you're falling in, in the search, you know, at number 10 or above, I mean, somebody's falling in above, above you. 
 

It's usually helpful to understand who that is, you know, who's the competitor? What, how does their product, how do you differentiate yourself, not only just in search performance, but just in other ways. So to understand how your competitor is doing commonly, very, very helpful. Everybody's attuned to it, so it really comes down to how effective is a tool that you can use to help understand those things so that you don't have to be doing a lot of legwork to understand those types of aspects about your competitors as related to your products and so forth. 
 

But certainly something that if you understand that better, it's going to help you compete as a brand in a variety of different ways. And then just the last, the last piece there relative to what we can tell you about, actually I'm probably going to, tag one on to this, this list here, but just merchandising updates, some preferences on the, on the retail side relative to how they're thinking about your product category,placement and all of those kinds of things. 
 

Very helpful to understand those things as well. The last thing that I just want to talk about here that didn't make the list apparently, but it's, it's pretty important is out of stock behavior, right? So, and, and it's sort of two aspects to that. Number one, I think I'm selling through a hundred stores, but I'm actually only listed in 50. 
 

I'm only showing up online in 50. If you don't know that you're missing out on some potentially some sales opportunity where if you know it, you can, you can correct that, ultimately get online in all 100 stores that you think you're supposed to be in. Right? So not necessarily out of stock, but sort of virtually out of stock, if you're not even showing up. 
 

And then the other aspect of it is out of stock. Right? So if you're in a hundred stores and in, you know, these three, you're constantly out of stock. You've got a supply chain problem, right? There's something that's happening that where you're not keeping up with the demand in that particular storage just means you're not selling anything, online. 
 

So the last aspect of that is we've seen instances where it shows online as out of stock. But if we look in the retailer's system, we can see stock in that store, right? So, online consumers aren't buying it because it says it's out of stock. Meanwhile, maybe you have some stock sitting there that we can see that is just, it's not getting depleted, right? So, again, one of those things, if you know about it, you can make a call, figure it out, get it sorted out. If you don't know, You just don't sell anything. 
 

[00:22:09] Stacy: Nightmare scenario. I'm, I'm curious on that, Randy. So obviously we know, you know, kind of the biggest one is Walmart. Kind of the, the, they're the neediest with love retailer. How, what are their expectations for suppliers and kind of understanding the nuances of, of all these things that you're calling out? I know obviously, you know, in the last. years, Omni has been a huge focus for them. And obviously with the release of Luminate, they're just leaning further and further into that. Do buyers expect their suppliers to know these types of things? What are your thoughts on that? What have you seen? 
 

[00:22:48] Randy: Yeah. Yeah. So a really close partner of us. So we stay really tuned into their expectations. Right. And so, you know, Luminate that's their, that's their opportunity. There's their option for helping a brand understand a lot of these things, right? 
 

So perfect. They would not do that if they were not very, hopeful that brands are going to take every opportunity they can to help improve the performance online. So that's certainly an option and it's certainly an indicator that they care. At the end of the day, whether it's Luminate or some other tool, they, they re they recognize that if the brand does something to improve their performance, everybody wins, right? So they care a lot. Other retailers do as well, but particularly Walmart, they care a lot about it. 
 

[00:23:35] Stacy: Very interesting. And kind of a theme that I'm hearing just as, as what you're saying, it's just more and more companies are figuring out how to allocate resources kind of towards this function. And not only to make their lives easier, because in that previous slide, I have, I've lived in the world of Excel before and anything, anytime a company can put everything in one place. 
 

Plays like one version of truth that's always better. But not only is it easier kind of on your end as a supplier, but retailers are caring more, you know, listening more, watching more. So definitely something that you want to again, just continue to, to pour resources in, whether it's homegrown or you work with a partner, whatever it is. Omni is, you know, kind of a duh statement, but Omni's kind of the way of the future. So if you're not at this stage or you know, the best stage, time to start thinking about stuff like that. 
 

[00:24:27] Randy: Yeah, we see, you know, when you talk about pouring resources on it. We do see some brands that are, are literally throwing people at it. 
 

So they have people, their job is to go out and check every product on every store it shows up on, on every digital property to make sure that nothing's out of line today. That's a lot of people doing a ton of work that you could replace very easily with a tool that just looks and tells you, send you alerts, proactive alerts. 
 

Like, Hey, you got a problem here. fix it versus. legions of people, right? So there's some very effective ways to do it. and, again, that's just what we see, see brands more and more toward leaning towards just these tools that can be used to do it versus manual effort associated with it. 
 

Okay. So just, moving on. So a couple of very key aspects we've already talked about, just the foundational stuff about how you think about your, your content. Making sure you have a sustainable way to keep it updated and improved and so forth. talked about just now, how do you see how that's reflected online? 
 

And, and stay really tuned into that. In both of those, where my head often goes is just the foundational aspects of my content. So, the image carousel, some of the master data, the, the, the structured content, like keywords and, and, feature value, bullet points, marketing copy, those kinds of things. 
 

Where I want to advance to now is all the opportunities that, as a brand, you have to improve digital performance, which, as we know today, now feeds into this hybrid in store shopping experience. All these opportunities you have to put content on the page over and above just that core content of your image carousel and your marketing copy or structured text. 
 

And so we think a lot about, you know, start scrolling down the page. What are all the things that I can put in front of a consumer to help them, you know, make a, hopefully a positive conversion decision as related to my product. So thinking about what we call rich content, right? So image carousel, marketing copy, great. 
 

But now how do we just get super rich about that? Use videos and recipes and all this fun stuff to inform and, and, and provoke a positive reaction out of, out of the consumer. So. All kinds of things you can do, but understanding how consumers are actually interacting with that kind of content, very important. 
 

Without understanding that, you could put a lot of stuff on the page. Maybe consumers aren't even compelled by it and they're not really looking at it or focusing on it. That's a problem. So understand how, how that, that, that, whether it's specific product messaging or brand messaging, whatever that is, how is that landing with the consumer? 
 

Super important that you understand that. So look for tools that can help you with that. User generated content analytics. So user generated content, what we're talking about there is ratings and reviews, typically, right? So consumers can go on and write a review about a product, but more often it's, it's a little bit the opposite of a consumer trying to make a purchasing decision. 
 

And they're looking for ratings and reviews to understand what did the last guy that bought this product say about it, right? And that's going to inform my decision as to whether I want to buy it or not. To be able to summarize that, wrap that up and understand just consumer generate, sentiment, at a high level. 
 

very helpful to understand, how your product is landing in the marketplace, right? And no, nobody likes to hear their baby being called ugly, but. It's better you hear it than not. So if that's what's happening in the marketplace, that somebody's writing negative reviews, great opportunity to come back and think harder about, you know, my product in general, how I'm packaging it, how I'm talking about it, all that text, the, the degree to which I'm informing the consumer, meaning sometimes consumers write a bad review because they buy something and it's not nothing wrong with the product. 
 

It just wasn't what they expected. It wasn't what they thought they were buying. So if you're not informing the consumer correctly, you're provoking a bad reaction, possibly a negative review, but you're also, going back to what we call manufacturing returns, right? You're selling something that it's going to get returned because the consumer didn't know what they were buying, and now you're in a worse place than if you just hadn't sold it to start, right? 
 

So all kinds of reasons why you want to understand how is your product landing from a consumer, sentiment, perspective. Product content iteration. We do a lot of work with, with customers, A B testing, right, to put some content out there, see what happens, maybe iterate it a little bit, test it again, see what happens. 
 

And you just understand like what are things that maybe I should be rolling out across my, my, my entire assortment relative to how I'm thinking about my content. so really to use those, those A B test type scenarios to iterate your content, very, very important. And then the last thing we call out there is product bundling, right? 
 

So opportunities that you have on some sites to, to, contribute to the concept of, of product bundling, which is essentially the consumer. If you buy this, well, we're going to suggest this, this, and this to go with it. Suggesting this, this, and this only works if the master data behind the scenes being used to formulate those product bundles, It's actually accurate or even exist in the first place, right? 
 

So to be very in tune into that as a brand, you may not know exactly what detail about your product is being used to formulate those bundles, but I guarantee you it is, there's some elements of it. So just be tuned into the fact that it is actually getting used that way. And if there's elements of detail that you could be providing that you're not today, you know, go back and look at that and see if it's something that you could improve about your product. 
 

So all of those things that, you know, you start scrolling down the page, lots of things you can do as a brand to ultimately sell, sell more stuff, whether it's just telling the consumer about your brand or that particular product. Again, it works. We know it works. Right. So it's just something to really want to get, get this thing over the line. That's some stuff that you should be thinking about. 
 

[00:30:13] Stacy: Got two quick questions for you, Randy. I think this is super awesome kind of stuff to think about. So the first one is around the user generated content analytics. So I think we talked in previous webinars about just the importance of like, like what you were saying, everyone is looking at reviews. 
 

I, that influences a big part of my purchasing decisions for myself, even when I'm online. I've been noticing lately a lot of kind of the paid reviews of like, hey, I was paid and I was, or I was offered this free product to give an honest review. Just curious, is that, I guess, you know, a resource for suppliers to think about? 
 

Number one, because I know even like Walmart, for example, They require you to have X number of reviews for each product you have online, which, you know, maybe not a hundred people are buying a water sprinkler or something. So is that a resource? And what is the general perception of that resource? I'm just curious there. 
 

[00:31:10] Randy: Yeah, really good question. So, so, you know, typically you're going to see those reviews that are Incentive are going to be called out as such, right? So just, you know, a verified consumer versus, versus something that was a paid review, for example, has to be called out. So, you know, at least, at least, you know, we see those land pretty equitably though. 
 

You know, at the end of the day, a review is a review. Just because I got the thing for free doesn't mean I'm obligated to write a good review. You know, the thing about a page review is, and we operate those programs, right? We call it sampling programs, right? Where on behalf of the brand, we send out a thousand samples of something. 
 

And in return, we ask that that person write a review. And again, we encourage that they're honest about it and so forth, and most of them are. But if you think about introducing a brand new product into the marketplace, you know, so you just created a new product, you send it out there, not going to have any reviews because nobody's had a chance to buy it yet, right? 
 

So what's a good way to get reviews the day that thing hits the digital shelf or the shelf in the store, you already have reviews. And the way that we do that is with sampling, right? So get out in front of that. You know, Hey, we're, you know, introducing this new thing. We'd love to hear your opinion about it. 
 

Get that. So the day it comes up, it's got reviews associated with it. That's just one of those tactics. And there's not another great way to do that. When you're introducing a new product, how do you have reviews day one? If you don't do something like that, right. So some different aspects of that, but they're legitimate tools, you know, that You just have to understand how that's being used. 
 

[00:32:37] Stacy: Yeah, no, that's great. And then kind of second question at the other side of the coin, so to your point, sometimes you will get those, I've, I've read reviews on Amazon where they're like one star because it got here late or something and you're like, what? So is there, Any mechanism for suppliers to help counter those types? 
 

I wouldn't, you know, it's almost like a fake review, or at least not a hundred percent accurate, because it's not really reviewing the product. it, are there mechanisms in place for suppliers to kind of tackle that, or what does that look, or do you just kind of, that is cost of, of selling on, you know, Amazon or Walmart.com or whatever it is? 
 

[00:33:15] Randy: Yeah, you know, I mean, the best, the best defense is have an awesome product, I guess. at the end of the day, you can't, you know, somebody is, it's going to land wrong with somebody. It just, you know, that's just how it goes. what we know today, it sounds crazy, but having, you know, if you have 10 reviews and a couple of them are negative, that's better than having seven reviews or five reviews, right? 
 

At least it, it shows that, you know, people are buying the product, right? And everybody, yeah, everybody factors in. Yeah, there's always one guy that you just can't please no matter what. but, you know, it's, it's, you know, it's, it's, it's part of it. You're going to have a couple of those. out there. and you know, if it's legit, you can tell if it's somebody that's just having a bad day or if it's somebody that's the legitimate thing that's like, wow, we didn't realize that about our product. 
 

We just never thought about that. Those are, that's a feedback mechanism that sometimes you just don't have when you're so close to your products, you know, as somebody that works for that brand that you just don't think about anything but the good stuff. So, you know, you take the good with the bad and you leverage that in whatever way you can is the bottom line. 
 

[00:34:14] Stacy: Yep. That's super helpful. 
 

[00:34:18] Randy: Okay. So at the end of the day here, I just want to, I just want to, wrap this all up, you know, going back to the very first webinar where we talked about just the creation of content, where does it come from, how do you do that sustainably, lots of different ways to get there when you think about, you know, how do we make sure we have e com ready imagery of our product, our marketing copy is in pretty good shape. 
 

All of our structured content looks great, lots of different ways to get there, but it's certainly something to put an investment in because today you cannot sell online without. Very good content and the performance of selling online when you think of going back to manufacturing and using that kind of thing. 
 

Again, you can do some damage if you don't think about it hard enough. So always start there. Not a one time activity. So moving down there to the lower right content management and delivery, right? How do you set up practices or use tools that can help you make sure your content is, is as up to date as it possibly can be, that you're continuing to improve it as you send it out, and then finally, how do you know how to improve it? 
 

If you don't use some practices around content optimization, just things that help you recognize the performance of it online outside of just anecdotal, you know, we're not selling as much as we need to kind of thing. really look at some things that are happening online to understand how can I come back to the, to the management aspect of it and then just improve my content. 
 

And you just have to look at that as a life cycle of things that you can do to ultimately sell more stuff, which again, that's what we're all here for. All right, Stacy, over to you. 
 

[00:35:47] Stacy: Yeah. Thank you, Randy. Thank you so much for kind of leading that really, really insightful discussion. so I get to kind of talk about the not so fun side of what happens, you know, if you aren't really optimizing your content and thinking through, because I know a lot of times it doesn't work. 
 

It feels like fluff sometimes. It's just like, ah, well, it's just a picture or it's just a whatever. But a lot of times people don't realize that there are a lot of downstream effects if you're not really thinking through, like, what does item setup look like? What does a case pack look like? What do those dreaded returns look like? 
 

And how do those impact your bottom line? so we always want to make sure that, you know, everything that Randy's talking about is extremely important because if you kind of, you know, mess up the first step. There are a lot of downstream effects down the line that can hurt your bottom line and hurt your P& L. 
 

So wanting to talk through that. So we shared this kind of metaphor in previous webinars, but I think it's a really nice way to think about why items set up and why content matters so much. we use the metaphor of a library book. So, you know, if you were to have a library book and, you know, Viol it in the wrong place in the library with the wrong title or a bad cover image, even though you may have written the best book in the world that everyone should read. 
 

Number one, they may not know what's the actual content of that book. And number two, even if, let's say they really do have heard of this book and they wanna go find it, if it's shelved in the wrong place, they'll never be able. to actually find it. So, even if you guys have kind of the best product in the world, if it's not labeled correctly, if it's not sold correctly, if it's not imaged correctly, you're going to prevent potential buyers from actually picking it up off the shelf or buying it online, because they just don't really understand kind of just how good that product is. 
 

So, we thought that's a great Pretty nice and easy metaphor to think about, like, as you think about creating item content for your particular products. So, as it relates to kind of thinking about item management, so our, on the SupplyPike side, we tend to think a little bit more on, like, the actual, like, the numbers side of things, and wanted to give you just a really easy example of how an item management error can can lead to a lot of pain down the road. 
 

so, you know, Randy was talking about having that single source of truth and making sure that everyone agrees on what a case pack should be and what the items in it should look like and getting all the right people in the room at the right time. so just as an example, let's just say on the retailer side, you have set up your items with a pack quantity of six. 
 

and You know, maybe for some reason, there was an update on the supplier side that you did not catch in your master item file or whatever it is. And to you, that particular item has a pack quantity of 144. Kind of an extreme example, but just, you know, to kind of illustrate the point. So, if the retailer were to order three cases from you, they would expect to get 18 each from you, versus on your side because you received a PO for three cases, it looks like it should be 144 eachs. to you, you may look like it, it looks like an order for 432 eachs that you then go and invoice for as well. so obviously there's gonna be a very huge discrepancy when it comes time to actually kind of reconcile the two. 
 

So not only will you receive a short. because, you know, Walmart will say, why did you invoice me for 432, but I only received 18 or whatever it is. so that will be confusing for you to have to tease through and figure out and kind of figure out if that's a valid deduction or not. But with a lot of retailers, they're now introducing like compliance programs around PO accuracy, because they want to try and minimize SupplierWiki has errors like this. 
 

So we've seen issues where, you know, suppliers that have items set up that isn't done, you know, 100 percent correct will get that deduction, which is already painful. And then on top of that, they'll get hit with kind of that arbitrary compliance fine as well. And this is just one item. Setup. as Randy said, there are suppliers out there, and I'm sure you guys online have probably experienced this as well. 
 

Hundreds of POs, hundreds of items across the 40 different retailers that you support, each expecting different configurations. So this can very, very quickly kind of compound, if you're not paying attention to, you know, hey, making sure that your item setup and the retailer's item setup are matching and, and having the same types of expectations. 
 

So, not to scare everyone, but Really important, if you guys don't have a master item person, I'd really recommend, looking and seeing if you can invest in that particular resource.so kind of thinking along those lines, you know, we again like to talk about how different issues can lead to roadblocks in your cash flow. 
 

So, again, we've got a lot of webinars on SupplierWiki, so I'm not going to go too far into the weeds for this particular slide. But, you know, item management is, if that's kind of the head of the proverbial snake, everything that flows behind it and beyond that can impact your P& L. So, we typically look at Kind of revenue loss in four main buckets. 
 

the first one is anything like off invoice deductions. So you can have shortages like we talked about, damages or returns like Randy has mentioned, substitution issues. If Walmart has ordered one thing and you ship the wrong thing, then you have a substitution problem. Pricing discrepancies also goes back to item setup. 
 

If Walmart expects, I keep saying Walmart, just because they're kind of a top of mind, but this applies to any retailer. if any retailer has an expectation around, you know, what price that product should be at, and for some reason your master item file's incorrect, now you have a pricing discrepancy issue, duplicate billing. 
 

you also have negotiated and expected revenue loss, so things like allowance, promotions, co ops, coupons, cash discounts. All of these are very, very, the item setup portion is extremely important when you're looking at these sorts of things, negotiating them, making sure the retailers are taking the right amount of discounts or the right amount of promotions. 
 

if not, again, it's just a very tangled web if you aren't kind of ensuring that you have this clean, from the very beginning. And then there's compliance fines, which are kind of alluded to in the previous slide. You have on time and full issues, SQEP, that's for Walmart, but Again, other retailers of other different programs. 
 

Now, again, more and more retailers we're seeing have labeling standards programs, process standards programs. So, if you're not labeling your boxes correctly, if you're not sending ASNs correctly, the PO isn't sent over correctly, you can get hit with fraud. and then the last really big bucket that we see a lot of suppliers handle is the audit side. 
 

So, not only can they take money from all of these different portions before, they will also come back and kind of shore up and true up even more using like random audits or annual quarterly true ups. So, again, not to, be a Debbie Downer, for all of this information. But, you know, we're really big believers, and I know the One World Sync team is too. 
 

The more you know, the more educated you are, kind of, you understand the rules of the game, you can play the game better, and, and not lose money unnecessarily to different retailers.so yeah, just kind of one little, couple of other things that I wanted to point out for those of you guys who are maybe newer to doing business with like big box retailers, is the concept of stacking finds. 
 

So, we use Walmart as an example again just because they're the largest one, but other retailers do this as well. A single issue, whether valid or invalid, often can lead to multiple deductions and fines. So Walmart, for example, does have the concept of stacking these fines for you. So I kind of mentioned earlier in that previous slide, if you have an item setup issue, you can get hit with a shortage deduction, an OTIF infill fine, and an SQEP fine. 
 

So you can get hit with three different buckets of RevLoss for the same issue, which, again, when you think about it across multiple items, multiple POs, multiple stores, multiple DCs, like that, again, compounds very, very quickly. and then just in Walmart, for example, every one of these has to be fought separately. 
 

So the AP deductions team is different than the compliance team, which is different than the post audits team. and you have to know. All of the processes to kind of get the right documentation with the right portals to make sure that you're getting that, you know, money that was taken incorrectly, you're getting it back. 
 

So again, I know we're kind of, you know, beating a dead horse here, but really, really want to stress the importance of getting things set up correctly, at the very, very beginning so that you're not having to figure out resources to recoup all of this money kind of later on down the road. so just things to think about.

And then the last kind of thought that I wanted to leave you guys with, we always like to try and make this a little bit more actionable for everybody. so wanting to make sure that you guys are at the very least having these conversations internally with your teams, if you're not already. So like, if you're just like throwing something on Amazon.com, maybe it's time to start asking some questions. So, internally, do you have a process to vet your items? if they have the most accurate content across all retailers. And as Randy mentioned, it can be a homegrown solution. If it's Excel, so be it. If it's a tool, if it's a partner, if it's a broker, whatever that is, are you guys looking at that kind of life cycle today? 
 

Another question to start asking yourself is does your team check for errors or the required assets at each retailer? So again, I know we talked a lot about Walmart and Amazon, but You know, pretty much every retailer today has a dot com presence and they have different expectations around how many reviews are needed, what sort of, you know, UGC is required. 
 

so making sure that every single one of these retailers, do you again, have that checklist to make sure that you are kind of setting yourself up for success. on those particular retailer. com, sites. should your team cross reference deductions or compliance fines with your item management data? 
 

So I will say, you know, Randy kind of talked about good, better, best. This is something that we see some of our kind of teams that are a little bit more sophisticated, usually in the better, best area. They're starting to tie those deductions and compliance fines back to item management. kind of in the, in the old days, which is not that long ago, but in the old days. 
 

Kind of finance team did their own thing. Supply chain team did their own thing. Marketing team did their own thing. But nowadays, like, suppliers are creating a little bit more of an ecosystem, and as Randy mentioned, that one source of truth. So everyone understands, you know, where the data is coming from, if we're getting hit with fines, why, and who do I need to get involved for those reasons. And then the last thing to kind of think about is, is inaccurate or outdated data the root cause of other supply chain issues. So if you guys are getting a bunch of compliance fines or in stock issues, as Randy mentioned, a lot of times item management, you know, is kind of the unsung hero. 
 

No one really thinks about that. They're always just like, oh, what's our warehouse doing? What's our carrier doing? but item management can actually be kind of that hidden. Terror in the back, because people set up their items one time and they go like, cool, we did that part. That was difficult. Let's move on without realizing that, you know, sometimes your sales team may have negotiated a different item pack configuration, which was not communicated with your, you know, item setup team. 
 

So, just things to think about. Do you have a system and a process of communication, for all of these things? And if not, Probably time to start thinking about that.cool. So, we just wanted to kind of move on to the Q& A section, Randy. I don't see any right now. If you guys have any, please feel free to drop them in the chat or Q& A. 
 

I did see Melissa asked, if we'll get emailed the slides of this webinar. Yes, you will. you'll get the slides as well as a recording of the webinar. so I guess maybe just one quick question that I had for you, Randy, is Again, you kind of mentioned that good, better, best. How would you say the suppliers, I know you mentioned you work with 15, 000 brands, just crazy. Like, are a majority of them in the good phase, in the better phase, moving towards best, or where do most people sit in that spectrum? 
 

[00:48:22] Randy: Yeah, you know, The 15, 000 brands that we work with today range from biggest CPGs on the planet down to, you know, mom and pop guys making something at home and selling it through their local store, right? 
 

So it's all over the place for us. So one of the challenges we have from a product management perspective is When we look at our solutions, they've got to fit and service the biggest guy down to the smallest person because, you know, they all deserve to, you know, to have these tools at their disposal. So we see it all over the place. 
 

At the high end, you know, they have money to throw at it and they tend to get very sophisticated about it. as you move down, down to the long tail, you know, often it's, you know, they just do not have the human resources to attribute to it, which would suggest, you know, think a little bit harder about technology that you can use to do that. 
 

What we do see, though, as a trend is just across our brand customer base, everybody's starting to think about it really, really hard, right? So maybe they're not quite there yet, but you know, they look at things like this today and are looking for ideas of how do I just keep getting a little bit more effective about it, a little bit more advanced about it. So that's the trend, right? Eventually, you know, everybody, everybody will get there, but it's kind of across the board today. 
 

[00:49:36] Stacy: Okay, very, very interesting. What would you say, Wendy, let's say I am kind of a newer ish supplier and I'm wanting to, you know, maybe I'm in that good, you know, kind of understand where things are. 
 

If I want to start taking that step towards the better, I know you kind of listed out the once you're there, these are the things to think about. How can you start to like corral those resources and start to like, you know, wink, wink, nudge, nudge, we may need a guy, like, what are your recommendations for that? 
 

[00:50:06] Randy: Yeah, you know, after you tackle the good, the good domain there, the good pillar of just get your stuff in one place so you can see it and you just more effectively judge how you're doing that, that, that best pillar, actually pretty easy to do because there's lots of tools that you can use today. We talked about Luminate just as an example of that. 
 

You know, we've got one, there's lots of them on the market that can tell you very quickly some of these things that are just going wrong in the marketplace. You don't have to put a lot of work into them. They tell you what's wrong. So really getting there, relatively simple, right? You know, it's, it's, it's always going to be an investment, but at the end of the day, these tools wouldn't exist if there wasn't proof that if you solve these problems, you're going to sell more stuff. 
 

Right. So that's really it. So, you know, that part of it, fairly simple to ratchet up into that, that better, better column. That's going to relieve you to now think about how do we just really get to pass and think really hard about our content. 
 

[00:51:02] Stacy: No, that, that makes a lot of sense. We, we see kind of similar trends on, on our side, obviously more on the RevLoss, but to your point, a lot of times it kind of starts with the mindset of like, Hey, like I want to invest in this particular silo. 
 

It's, you know, we could do it manually, but we're all killing ourselves doing it. So yes, it's an investment to your point, but like, hey, obviously let's invest in the right tools and make the most sense for our business. But it's shifting that mindset from like, yeah, we're like, we're doing fine to like, hey, how do we supercharge this thing? 
 

Which again, I think it's just interesting and obviously not trying to push anyone in a certain direction, but. It is, you know, obviously Omni is kind of the way of the future and as retailers lean into that, I think that's just something that more and more suppliers are going to have to just kind of get, get into that mindset. 
 

[00:51:53] Randy: Yep, 
 

[00:51:53] Stacy: for sure. Awesome. so we did get one last quick Question, Emmanuel said you mentioned that this is part three, where we can we get the first two parts of this presentation, that is going to be available at SupplierWiki, if you just type in SupplierWiki.com, that'll take you there, and you'll be able to access, the recordings as well as the slide decks for, for all three parts, the part one and part two are already online, and part three in a couple of days, we'll upload that, and you guys will be able to access that there. 
 

Okay, well then, in the interest of time, I'll go ahead and kind of wrap this up a little bit, so if you guys, have any questions that maybe you, you know, after we got out of this webinar, you're like, ah, I should have asked this question, please feel free to reach out to Randy and I directly. 
 

These are our real email addresses. If you have any questions about 1WorldSync or content optimization, Randy is going to be your best resource. If you have any questions about revenue loss, compliance, fines, supply chain issues, feel free to reach out to me and I'll make sure I quarterback you to the right person. 
 

And you can, of course, visit our websites at 1worldsync.com or supplypike.com. and yeah, I, you know, I think we were gonna spend just a couple of minutes talking about what we do like in our actual day-to-Day chops. We love doing webinars, so if you guys wanna drop off. Feel free to, but just again, if you guys are curious on what we do day to day, Randy and I are just going to spend about a couple of minutes talking about SupplyPike as well as 1WorldSync. 
 

so yeah, so if, in case this is where you guys do drop, thank you so much. we really, really enjoyed spending time with you guys. Thank you, Mary, for the shout out. We appreciate that. but yeah, wanting to just talk really quickly about, So, you know, I kind of mentioned at the top of the webinar, we are an automated software solution that's, that works specifically on automating deduction recovery. 
 

So if you guys are shipping to a Walmart or a Target or an Amazon and you're not getting paid in full, which happens all the time. a lot. usually we find on average about 6 percent of invoices are being lost to deductions or compliance fines. So for every 100 you invoice Walmart, they're going to take 6 free and clear off the top and a lot of times those deductions are actually invalid. So it's a receiving issue. They didn't scan it in the warehouse correctly. They didn't apply the right allowance. We So a lot of times we see that suppliers can actually win that money back. the process to do it is extremely manual. usually it takes about 15 to 20 minutes to actually, you know, kind of do the research, validate, and then actually go into their portals and type everything in. 
 

The beauty of software is that we can basically take all all of that work off your plate. So we automate the research validation proof gathering for all deductions, and we'll automatically submit them to the retailer on your behalf and track the process and progress for you. So, we work with Walmart, Target, Kroger, Amazon, and we actually just launched support for Home Depot yesterday. 
 

So that's exciting. so if you guys are curious. to learn more about how we can support, deductions for you. Please feel free to reach out to us. we're happy to just do a longer tour and show you what the actual product looks like. we do a completely free analysis. It's a two year audit where we'll show you every dollar that these retailers have taken and what you can win back. 
 

So I always recommend it, worse comes to worse, you know, even if it doesn't make sense and you don't work with SupplyPike, at the very least you've gotten a two year free audit and you can take that and use that internally with your teams. So yeah, if you're curious, check out SupplyPike.com and Randy, I'll kind of hand it over to you to talk about 1WorldSync. 
 

[00:55:39] Randy: Yeah, so just, I know we're out of time, so just quickly, everything I talked about, we have a solution for, right, so just from right to left, along the bottom. Imagery, if you don't have it, we can create it for you. Copy, if it's not great, we can help you improve it. Below the fold, I talked about all those solutions. 
 

We have solutions for those different areas of below the fold rich content. I talked about product assortments or bundling in ratings and reviews. You know, just, just always, we're just seeing that creep up the scale in terms of what consumers are expecting to see online. And then finally, we talked about this digital shelf analytics. 
 

I'm You can't fix it if you don't know what's wrong. We have a tool that's aimed at that. So are you in as many stores as you think? Are you out of stock where you shouldn't be? All of those things, we have solutions for all of that. So certainly reach out to us. Hello at 1worldsync.com is how you can get a hold of us or me directly. Either way, happy to, to, to assist you guys. So with that, thanks everybody for your time today. We appreciate it. And we always love sharing this stuff. 
 

[00:56:33] Stacy: Awesome. Thank you all. Bye guys.