e-commerce is the only growing channel in retail and robust digital content is absolutely critical to be successful. Content is necessary to find a product (e.g. via search) and to convert once a customer finds the product. The onus rests on manufacturers to manage their digital content. “There is tremendous complexity in managing a large assortment in a visual environment and success requires much different activation than brick & mortar. It is critical to have the right tools to manage your data and content,” remarks Dave Feinleib, CEO and Founder of Content Analytics, Inc. (CAI). San Francisco based firm CAI provides an enterprise-level analytics platform that identifies opportunities to improve digital content of online retailers and the tools to make those improvements directly on the sites.

CAI’s content management system begins with Product Information Management (PIM) and Digital Asset Management (DAM) tools that host product data in a secure cloud environment with 24X7 access. PIM and DAM systems warehouse product attributes (dimensions, size, color, style, etc) and content attributes (videos, images, and descriptions) to allow manufacturers to keep all of this data in one safe and secure location.

The second step is content syndication - sending content to retailers to optimize product pages. CAI publishes content from their PIM/ DAM systems to e-commerce sites like Amazon, Walmart.com, and Target. com. “Syndicating assets to multiple retailers from one portal solves a huge manufacturer pain point. Our advanced tools make this incredibly easy for brands and saves them a tremendous amount of time,” comments Feinleib.

The final step is the analytics engine. CAI deploys its world-class web scraper across millions of item pages on dozens of e-commerce sites daily to obtain hundreds of attributes for each item.