Standardised representation of product data across various online and offline retail platforms is being worked upon by leading e-tailers and retailers of the country that include Flipkart, Reliance Retail, Amazon, the Future Group, and Big Basket. This standardisation would help in uniformity and consistency.
Seamless sharing of product data between the companies and manufacturers due to this move would also result in considerable decrease admin costs, which are incurred presently in data exchange with each e-tailer and retailer, individually.
Formats of images that need to be uploaded on the online platforms and product data that requires sharing, such as dimensions, net weight, product classification, description, and maximum retail price, would be included in this sharing of product data.
A standards organisation set up in the country, GS1 India, which is set up by the Ministry of Commerce & Industry and other apex trade bodies has assisted in forming the group.
One Amazon spokesperson, who confirmed this development said that they were always looking at exploring new ways to augment the customer and seller experience on their portal and were assessing the possibilities of working with GS1.
A consumer, currently, is able to view diverse images and descriptions of the same product. One senior executive from a big e-commerce organisation explaining said that this was because the e-tailers picked the product data from different sellers or sources. Manpower in large numbers is employed to collect, clean and feed this data into the system by every e-tailers, he added.
Ravi Mathur, CEO of GS1 said that sourcing data from a single database would enable access to product information seamlessly across channels by both retail and online platforms through the means of standardisation, which means sourcing data from a single database. He added that this would also help in providing a consistent shopping experience and product comparison across various search engines to the consumers.
