Why is Reliable & Updated Product Data Critical for Omni-Channel Retail

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.

Smart Consumer App is The New System for Redressal of Consumer Complaints: FSSAI & MoCA

FSSAI and Ministry of Consumer Affairs informed the Industry about the new system for redressal of consumer complaints through integration with the ‘Smart Consumer’ mobile app of Department of Consumer Affairs, during the National Conference on ‘Enabling Regulatory Compliance & Connecting with Consumers’.

The conference was jointly organised by Ministry of Consumer Affairs, FSSAI, and GS1 India recently and attended by over 100 companies, including leading brand owners, retailers, and online shopping portals. Some of the participants include Reliance Retail, Big Bazaar, Amazon, Canteen Stores Department, Coca Cola, Paytm, Kellogg’s, Flipkart, Grofers, Walmart, Nestle, Dabur, Patanjali, J&J, HUL, Britannia, Mondelez, Kraft Heinz, ITC, Tata Global Beverages, Mother Dairy, amongst many others.

Shri Pawan Agarwal, CEO, FSSAI, stated that with this integration, no consumer complaint would go unresolved and consumers would gain visibility to FSSAI license number certificates and product recall alerts.

Shri P V Rama Sastry, JS, Department of Consumer Affairs explained how scanning of barcodes (which use GTIN – Global Trade Identification Numbers) on consumer products using the Smart Consumer app would enable consumers to read marking and labelling information with ease, which is otherwise difficult due to small print on product labels.

Leading retailers and brand owners, including Nestle India, Reliance Retail, Canteen Stores Department, Big Bazaar and others shared their experiences of exchanging product data with trading partners using DataKart – a national repository of retailed product data that feeds in information to smart consumer mobile app. They also talked about how DataKart helps them in mitigating challenges in access to quality, up-to-date data on retailed products, including on new product introductions, product withdrawals, active/inactive SKUs, product changes, etc.

Finally, GS1 India provided a detailed roadmap on how Indian Retail Industry could comply with Regulatory requirements and exchange product information amongst stakeholders through DataKart.

Further, the regulators also informed Industry on various Legal Metrology requirements, product recall, and e-commerce guidelines for food business operators.

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