Any business engaged in multichannel eCommerce knows how essential it is that product information is both accurate and up-to-date. Nothing spoils the customer experience more than ordering a product whose specification has changed from that shown on the website. So, when product specifications change, it is essential that the Product Information Management System (PIM) updates promptly and automatically and then delivers these content changes to all users, e.g. distributors, resellers and customers.
JSON and PIM Systems
As businesses strive to distribute their product data across multiple channels accurately and efficiently, the role of JSON (JavaScript Object Notation) as a data exchange format has become increasingly significant due to its simplicity and compatibility with various platforms. JSON’s schema-less nature allows it to handle a wide variety of data structures, accommodating the complex and varied product attributes, typical for PIM systems. This flexibility offered by JSON is particularly beneficial for managing dynamic and evolving product catalogues. In addition, JSON’s lightweight format ensures efficient data transmission, which is crucial for maintaining fast and responsive applications, especially when dealing with large volumes of product data. JSON is natively supported by most modern programming languages and platforms, ensuring seamless integration with web applications, mobile apps, and other systems involved in product data syndication.
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The Challenge of Data Syndication in PIM
Data syndication involves the exchange of product information between various systems, including e-commerce platforms, marketplaces, ERP systems, and more. This process is essential for ensuring that product details such as descriptions, prices, availability, and specifications are consistent and up-to-date across all channels. However, maintaining data integrity during syndication is a challenging task for any PIM system due to differences in data formats, structures, and standards across platforms. Ensuring that the product information is accurate, complete, and up-to-date across all channels can be challenging for many reasons.
Data Consistency
When aggregating product data from various sources, each source may have its own format, structure, and level of detail, some can also have incomplete or outdated data. This can lead to inconsistencies, which in turn can result in customer dissatisfaction and loss of sales.
Real-Time Updates
When product data changes, it needs to be reflected in real-time across all channels. However, ensuring real-time or near-real-time synchronization of data between the PIM and other systems is complex, especially with high data volumes and frequent updates. Minimizing latency and ensuring timely updates across all integrated systems is critical but difficult to achieve.
Integration Complexity
Connecting PIM systems to various platforms, marketplaces, ERP systems, and other third-party applications can be complex and time-consuming. Each system may have its own data formats (XML, JSON, CSV), standards (GS1, proprietary formats), structures, and APIs or may require diverse integration approaches and tools. Therefore, ensuring seamless data flow between systems requires technical expertise for data transformation and mapping to ensure compatibility, in which case normalizing data into a consistent format for syndication can be challenging and time-consuming.
Data Governance
Different regions have varying data privacy and protection regulations (e.g., GDPR, CCPA) and ensuring compliance with these regulations across all data syndication activities adds complexity. Furthermore, maintaining comprehensive audit trails to demonstrate compliance and manage data governance effectively requires sophisticated tracking and reporting mechanisms.
How JSON Comparison Software Simplifies Data Syndication
Traditional comparison methods often involve a quick comparison of hashed product data upon receiving the information from an e-commerce platform. However, this method only shows that there is change, not where the change is, hence requires wiping the current information and replacing it with the new data when change is detected. This can be time consuming and lead to errors, system downtime, and increased operational costs, calling for a more automated process. Building your own custom comparison function can offer a much more personalised approach to data management, however, it can be very complex, labour intensive and difficult to scale with the ever-changing landscape of e-commerce.
Therefore, adopting a JSON comparison software into your PIM can result in significant cost savings associated with labour, error correction, and potential disruptions caused by inaccurate data. This makes the investment in JSON comparison software a wise choice for any business looking to optimise their PIM operations.
Let’s explore a scenario where a PIM system needs to syndicate product information, such as prices, availability, specifications, to multiple e-commerce platforms. A JSON comparison software can be seamlessly embedded into the PIM via an API and configured to enable the PIM to:
- Compare the JSON data received from different vendors to the existing product information that it holds.
- Identify any discrepancies instantly.
- Validate the accuracy of the data before it is syndicated to the e-commerce platforms.
- Synchronize the product data across all platforms, ensuring consistency and reliability.
By automating the comparison, PIM systems can now regularly check for updates in product information and synchronize changes across all connected platforms. This automation reduces manual effort and minimizes the risk of errors, achieving real time, accurate data exchange.
DeltaJSON
This is why we, at DeltaXML, developed an enterprise solution that can be easily built into a PIM system for faster, more accurate data processing. DeltaXML has been a market leader in comparison and merge software technologies for XML and JSON formats for over 20 years. To tackle the unreliable change tracking of existing comparison methods, our research and development team devised new algorithms for faster, more efficient data management, forming the basis of DeltaJSON.
The beauty of DeltaJSON is that it’s highly customisable and identifies all differences in your product data according to your specific configuration. You can compare JSON files from different sources to identify discrepancies in product information. By highlighting differences in product attributes, prices, descriptions, and availability, it enables quick identification and resolution of inconsistencies. This ensures that all platforms have synchronized and accurate product data.
