The product data integration is broken and we are going to fit it!
Which protocol is being used over 6 billion times every single day in the retail world? Barcode scanning. Barcodes have been invented in 1973 and they are probably the greatest invention ever within the retail world. Unfortunately, it hasn’t evolved since its creation and every alternatives (QR codes, RFIDs, etc) failed replacing it as it was not strong enough or too expansive.
One of the biggest change within retail is the amount of data required based on consumer and legislator demands. Can you guess how much data you can store within a barcode? About 10 bytes. Now try to guess know how much data you need to build an ecommerce product page? About 3 Megabytes. This means that in order to build a webpage, a brand would need to stick about 300,000 barcodes over it. Not sure that the design team would be very happy about this solution.
In order to solve this problem, in 2004, GS1, the organization maintaining the barcode protocol, took a different approach. They’ve built a cloud based data pool, called Global Data Synchronisation Network (GDSN). You scan any barcode, you get all the information about this particular product over the internet. It was a brilliant idea. Except, 14 years later, adoption rate is less than 3%. In fact, even this figure seems too high since based on my experience as a distributor, only 1 business partner out of hundreds suggested me to subscribe to a GDSN compliant platform.
During our time at Entrepreneur First, we’ve contacted 72 retailers across 11 countries and ask them one simple question: why were they not using the GDSN protocol? Here are their top 4 answers…
In fact, retailers doesn’t like GDSN so much that they would rather stick to Excels and WeTransfers. So, for those of you who are not familiar with this process here is how a traditional retail collaboration usually goes like:
Distributor
“Here are the attributes I need in the format I need ?” Or so I believe…
Silence from the supplier
3 days later
Distributor
“Hi, I just wanted to check that you had receive my previous email.”
Supplier
“Sorry for not replying. We were a bit buisy rearranging our assortment over Amazon. We’ll get to it in the coming days”
10 days later
Supplier
“Sorry for keeping you waiting. Here it is our full assortment”
Distributor
“But it’s not what i’ve asked you at all… ”
Supplier
“Sorry, I just realized that you had sent a template to comply with. Here it is”
Distributor
“(1) The assortment doesn’t match what we agreed on. (2) Half of the attributes are missing. (3) How am I supposed to link the images with the excel listing?”
Supplier
“Don’t you have interns?”
Silence from the distributor
Supplier
“Just kidding. Here is the agreed assortment”
5 days later
Distributors
“We are missing 20% of what we agreed on.”
Suppliers
“I know but our stock level have changed since the other day”
3 day later
Distributors
“Why can’t I access the images any more?”
Suppliers
“If you haven’t subscribe to WeTransfer Pro, the link only works for 7 days”
Distributors
“Just send me samples and I will take care of it”
Suppliers
“Attached is our 5 pages sample agreement. Can you please sign it?”
…
After experiencing 4 years of such inefficiency, Scalia was born.
At Scalia, we’ve built a data pool that solves all of these issues. Our approach is innovative in 3 ways:
- We rely on a great UX so that anyone can onboard and benefit within minutes
- We make it super easy to share, open source or collaborate so that there are massive mutualization gains.
- Finally, our algorithm remembers every action made by the users in order to improve our suggestions over time
Product listing is a massive marketplace but the lack of collaboration tools makes it highly inefficient. At Scalia, we believe that any product data should be easily and cheaply accessible to any retailers. In order to do so, we’ve built 5 features to cover any basic needs.
Each one of them can be used individually depending on the user needs. And each one of them is accessible through our web platform or a RESTful API to fit any size requirements.
Let’s build XXIst century barcodes.
Scalia is a SaaS platform which help lifestyle and fashion brands to share their product data with retailers and other business partners. Thanks to machine learning algorithms, we consolidate and standardize product data so that anyone can access it in the format they want, offering flexibility, control and consistency to the whole ecosystem.
