Few things matter as much in a digital storefront as product photos and videos. Why? And how do you ensure that catalogs are populated with valuable, high-performing digital assets?

The correlation between quality media and conversions

When it comes to catalogs, whether in the more traditional sense of the term (paper or PDPs) or in the more current sense (PDPs and PLPs of e-commerce sites and marketplaces), the lowest common denominator is multimedia content.

This is especially true online, where product photos are the beacon that guides the customer journey for 3 out of 4 buyers (Weebly). On the Web, 60 percent of shoppers consider image quality the most important factor in their purchasing decisions (DeepImage).

Clips also make a difference: the presence of product videos, in fact, can increase PDP and landing page conversions by 80 percent (Renderforest).

Product shooting: freelance photographer or agency?

The impact of item videos and photos on online business makes the role of product shooting, the process by which multimedia content representing the assortment is created, central.

One of the key decisions, in particular, is whether to outsource the product shoot to a freelance photographer or a professional agency.

For small projects or one-off campaigns, the flexibility-as well as the personality-of a freelance photographer can be excellent allies. In the specific case of videos and photos produced for PDPs and catalogs, however, it is the agency that proves to be the only viable solution.

5 reasons to entrust a product shooting to a professional agency

1. Consultative approach

By outsourcing the product shoot to an agency, the photo shoot is the result of a workflow that, from the brief, involves several professionals with multi-sectoral experience.

2. Consistent quality

An agency, especially a structured one, has dedicated sets and quickly replicates the shooting conditions established in the brief, even at different times. This allows for photos and videos of consistent quality and with consistent characteristics over time.

3. Mix of creativity and expertise

An agency team works on multiple projects every day, taking in insights on current trends and the effectiveness in terms of conversions of certain types of shots, capitalizing on them in new briefs with a view to continuous improvement.

4. Zero sunk costs

The quote for a product shoot provided by a professional agency includes more than just the shoot itself.

Lights, equipment, space, post-production, speed, in addition to the aforementioned know-how, are necessary resources for quality video and photos product; the absence of which, can present steep bills in terms of customer experience.

Or, often, in the case of shoots done by freelance photographers, appearing only later, somewhat like an iceberg when the sailing is going well.

5. Additional services

Unlike a freelance photographer, an agency goes beyond product photos. At WARDA, for example, we partner with 1PHOTO, a shooting agency with 20 years of experience in fashion & luxury.

Together, we offer the complete solution for product catalog management, amplifying the quality and efficiency of the entire catalog management flow.

1PHOTO & SeeCommerce: the complete solution for your catalogs

The goal of our partnership with 1PHOTO is to offer virtuous brands a one-stop solution for creating, managing and propagating catalogs.

The highest quality video and product photos produced by 1PHOTO, combined with SeeCommerce’s Product eXperience Management performance, multiply sales performance on every digital channel, elevating the ROI of any PDP.

How does the 1PHOTO-SeeCommerce product video and photo stream work?

Once the brief is defined, the items – even in multiple small batches – are shipped to 1PHOTO’s professionals, who, after a product check, produce videos and product photos in one of 20 dedicated sets in the more than 2,000 m2 photo studios.

The shooting and post-production flow is rote: after items are received, in no time the media are shared with the customer and, automatically, loaded into the product views in the catalogs managed in SeeCommerce.

From our PXM to B2B and B2C touchpoints, the step is short. In fact, instantaneous, thanks to the APIs that connect SeeCommerce to e-commerce marketplaces and CMSs.

Not to mention natively managed Brand Portals within our PXM: 100% customizable web portals that make media and product data exchange with any stakeholder (such as partners, sales and PR) immediate.

Benefits of a single solution to manage catalogs

Choosing an end-to-end catalog management flow means multiplying both the benefits from quality-media PDPs and automatically created and propagated catalogs.

Together, in fact, a PXM software and a professional video and photo product shooting agency enable: 

• Cutting down time to market: minimizing manual labor for various activities, such as making, organizing, and uploading product videos and photos online or enriching and translating product sheets

• Reduce the number of returns: thanks to PDPs rich in both accurate multimedia content as well as accurate, multi-language and consistent data across every touchpoint

• Elevate the customer experience: through quality and optimized media to make each web session flawless, enhancing SEO performance through lightweight sites and e-commerce complete with every piece of information needed.

Let us unveil the potential of your catalog management flow

Click here and let’s arrange a no-obligation chat with one of our experts.

We will evaluate together your company’s data, video, and photo product management flow, reasoning about possible room for improvement from optimizing the catalog management flow: from shooting to PDP.

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In the omnichannel era, Product Syndication is a key ally in customer experience and time to market. In this article we analyze what it is and how it works.

What is meant by Product Syndication

Product Content Syndication (PCS acronym) or more briefly Product Syndication is the term for the automated digital flow by which a company distributes quality media and product information to marketing and sales channels.

The goal of Product Content Syndication.

The Product Content Syndication process – supported by Product eXperience Management software such as SeeCommerce – enables automatic PDP and PLP updates of catalogs on the brand’s various touchpoints.

Benefits offered by Product Syndication

Automatic propagation of content and data is invaluable in reducing the manual work of updating product catalogs, shortening the time to market significantly, especially in cases of large assortments with frequent rotations.

The benefits also affect the CX: as we will see shortly, thanks to dynamic transformations, image and video attributes are automatically adapted to the various touchpoints, ensuring that each user always has an optimal multi-channel experience.

A transformation that, in turn, is also reflected in the overall SEO performance and Web Core Vitals performance of websites and e-commerce.

The Role of PXM Software in Product Syndication

Geared toward the catalogs of the various touchpoints, Product Syndication is primarily concerned with two souls of the company’s assets: data and product content.

That’s why a PXM software is the perfect solution to support this process; unlike PIM and DAM, in fact, a Product eXperience Management tool allows product information and media to be governed from a single solution, simplifying the IT stack.

The following are the main features of a PXM software to support Product Syndication.

Media & data ingestion

Centralization of multimedia content and catalog-related information is the first step preparatory to Product Syndication.

SeeCommerce, for example, thanks to easy-to-implement APIs, dialogues effectively with tools such as ERP, MDM and PLM, and supports massive imports of all file and data formats.

Naming convention

PXM software with naming convention capabilities marks a marked difference from the traditional “silo” approach of Digital Asset Management and Product Information Management software.

Once the information assets have been centralized, in fact, the naming convention automatically associates each media content with all the data related to the products it represents.

SeeCommerce, for example, based on configurable rules and nomenclature, reads the file name and recognizes the product with which the media is associated automatically, cutting down on manual work.

Data quality & data transformation

Again on the basis of configurable rules, moreover, PXM software transforms centralized information, enriching a product without the need for any manual activity.

For example, from the product code, SeeCommerce can infer numerous pieces of information such as color, size, country of origin of production, avoiding the need for them to be entered through time-consuming data-entry necessary for data quality and data transformation.

Automatic look generation

Product Syndication can-in fact, should-be much more than just a cascading flow of data and media to end channels. The best PXMs, including SeeCommerce, allow the creation of looks or bundles to be made automatic, which is very useful in industries such as fashion, food and manufacturing.

Based on one or more attributes, our Product eXperience Manager automatically generates valuable product combinations to suggest one or more related items to customers on the various touchpoints, favoring up and cross-selling.

Automatic categorization of products

One of the most appreciated features of SeeCommerce, again from a Product Syndication perspective, relates to automatic categorization of products.

Based on a product’s attributes and flexible rules, our PXM associates each item with different categories within brand portals, e-shops, and marketplaces where the brand is present, resulting in catalogs that are automatically differentiated by touchpoint.

Product Feed Management & Media Delivery

In a nutshell, Product Syndication consists of two flows that, in the PXM-type approach, are closely connected: the Product Feed Management & Product Media Delivery.

SeeCommerce, in particular, has fast and easy-to-implement APIs that ensure consistent and effective propagation of content, from upstream to downstream, made particularly performant by the CDN and Dynamic Media Transformation features.

Content Delivery Network

SeeCommerce leverages Amazon’s content delivery network (AWS CloudFront) to propagate photos and videos of all formats at peak performance, regardless of the traffic peaks of a Web touchpoint and the geographic location from which users browse.

Dynamic Media Transformation

Last but not least, another crucial SeeCommerce feature from a Product Syndication perspective is Dynamic Media Transformation.

In fact, our platform dynamically adapts various image or clip attributes-such as format, size, aspect ratio, or background color, cutting down on the manual work otherwise required to optimize each digital asset against the specific requirements of individual channels.

How about seeing Product Syndication at work?

If you’d like to learn more about all the features and potential of data and product media syndication, as well as discover best practices for your industry of choice, click on the button below-we’ll set up a short demo to answer all your curiosities!

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PIM and eCommerce, a marriage that is often a valuable combination for achieving business goals while maintaining high levels of productivity. Here’s when!

PIM eCommerce: the role of product information management

We have talked about Product Information Management on several occasions in this blog, including comparing PIM, PXM and DAM software. In this article we will look at the main signs that indicate the need to adopt PIM software.

#1 Scattered product data

275. Although decreasing, the average number of software in companies’ digital ecosystems (Zylo) is very high and often generates high fragmentation of information.

From a PIM eCommerce perspective, this translates into a generalized entropy of spreadsheets, emails and notes of various types. Typical context in which – to populate product catalog, PDP and PLP – it takes a long time, you risk delays and you are never certain that the data is correct.

#2 Inconsistent product sheets

Another sign that a digital solution is needed to manage product data.

Especially in multi-channel contexts, manual management of information (via data-entry or import/export) can easily give rise to inconsistencies, resulting from the misalignment of content representing the same product in different touchpoints.

A phenomenon that as many as 3 out of 4 customers notice and that can fuel returns or penalize CX.

#3 Updating channels takes a lot of time

Another recurring bellyache solved by the PIM eCommerce pairing relates to updating product-related data, descriptions, and multimedia content, especially in contexts where items rotate often and are subject to seasonality, as in the case of Grünland.

#4 Incomplete product sheets

For 87% of online shoppers, the informative richness of a product sheet is crucial to making purchase decisions.

A requirement that often jarring in contexts where the assortment is large and time to generate, update, and publish descriptions and multimedia content is limited, pushing companies to a choice between launching late catalogs or partially populated PDPs.

#5 Managing translations is very costly

In cases where business is developed in multiple geographic markets, translating product information is also an issue that can prove to be perennial and crucial from a PIM eCommerce perspective.

Without centralized management of the process, translating data can be time-consuming and occur through hours of manual work on multiple worksheets, encouraging the proliferation of misalignments and requiring additional loading activities once the translation is complete.

#6 Scaling to new marketplaces is complex

An omnichannel approach, while essential for business, requires major operational adaptation efforts from companies’ marketing and e-commerce teams.

Each marketplace, for example, categorizes products differently, just as the specifications regarding media content (such as background color, size and proportions of images and videos) are different.

In the absence of a structured digital catalog management approach, landing on new touchpoints can become a very complex challenge.

#7 Absence of version and revision control

Another good reason to consider a PIM solution for eCommerce relates to the control. Indeed, in medium-sized companies, there are many people and teams enriching the product information base.

Without a tool to centralize and enrich products, tracking who did what and, if needed, accessing the previous version of a piece of content is at best … very difficult.

#8 Absence of version and revision control

For the same text content, web pages that contain multimedia content such as a video are 80 percent more likely to convert.

In these cases, without proper digital solutions (on all, PXM software, even more so than PIMs) approval and sharing of content is likely to slow down due to continuous unstructured exchanges via file sharing tools (WeTransfer, Dropbox, and so on).

PIM eCommerce or PXM software?

Did you find your company in these lines? We’re glad, because what you read are some of the challenges we at WARDA have helped our clients overcome.

How. With SeeCommerce, our PXM software that evolves the traditional PIM approach, shifting the focus from managing individual data to managing brand catalogs.

Want to schedule a no-obligation demo to find out live how it works? Click here!

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What does the acronym DAM (digital asset management) stand for? What does it mean to manage digital assets? How can a DAM software platform make a difference?

Digital Asset Management: what the acronym DAM means.

Digital asset management (DMA) is the umbrella term that encapsulates within it the set of business activities related to multimedia content.

Specifically, digital assets are defined as photos, video, audio and documents; their management includes creative, approval, organizational and distribution flows(to channels and stakeholders).

What digital asset management is for

With positioning, promotion and sales strategies increasingly web-oriented, brands have long since established their online presence on multiple channels, such as social accounts, proprietary websites and e-commerce, B2C and B2B marketplaces, supplier portals or customer apps.

These touchpoints are united by the presence of digital assets.

Quality photographic shots, emotional videos but also user manuals or branded podcasts enable people to get information, interact with each other, and make informed purchases.

By managing digital assets, internal processes of creation, approval and sharing can be accelerated, as well as ensuring consistent and widespread dissemination of quality media to the outside world.

In a nutshell, governing digital assets elevates internal productivity and the quality of each user’s Customer eXperience.

Functionality of a DAM software, Digital Asset Management

Digital asset management (DAM), especially in medium-structured business settings, is entrusted to tools called DAM software.

These are typically cloud solutions delivered in Software as a Service (SaaS) mode, which among their main features enable:

• Accelerate content creation and approval: through timed assignment of creative and review tasks to designers, photographers, and marketers, building approval flows, and monitoring workflows;
• Organizing digital assets: storing the most up-to-date and previous versions within spaces (e.g., folders) that can be accessed in a controlled manner, through pre-configured roles and permissions(Digital Rights Management)
• Distribute updated online media: so that every web channel is aligned.

Teams and sectors that benefit from DAM software

It goes without saying: a multimedia content hub benefits all business departments.

Given, however, the scope of daily processes (branding and sales) in which it offers support, certainly the marketing area and sales team are usually the work groups that benefit most from a Digital Asset Management solution.

They are closely followed by the IT area-which is guaranteed greater security of the company’s information assets-and the Product area, with a space in which to index and share sketches, prototypes and renderings.

In terms of industries, granted that a DAM software offers cross-sector benefits, it is highly valued by companies in the fashion & luxury, beauty, retail, furniture & design as well as manufacturing worlds.

Benefits provided by digital asset management

A Digital Asset Management strategy (and software) provides many benefits:

• is a source of truth: a DAM tool centralizes scattered digital assets, cutting down the time it takes to search for content (thanks in part to metadata, which expands its informational reach) and always offering certainty of finding the most up-to-date version
• time to market: in a DAM, workflows converge and, many of them, are automated, shortening the content supply chain and, in turn, lowering the time needed to create and distribute product catalog, PDPs, and PLPs
• brand consistency: a DAM software ensures that every stakeholder (PR, agencies, web users, social followers, B2B customers, business partners, …) is reached by the perfect (and consistent in terms of brand image) version of a file.

These are tangible benefits for businesses, as evidenced by the continued growth of the Digital Asset Management and DAM software industry.

Software DAM market data

The strategic role of Digital Asset Management is confirmed by the relentless annual growth of the global DAM software market.

Revenue generated by Digital Asset Management in 2024 exceeded $4.5 billion (it was $3.9 billion in 2023); according to forecasts, by 2032, it will be $16.1.

Numbers aside, the trend is more than understandable given-in addition to the data mentioned in the opening-a couple of factors closely related to Digital Asset Management.

First and foremost, the unstoppable digital transformation of companies in the hunt for greater productivity, a hot topic especially for Italian companies, as highlighted by Istat.

Indeed, in the ICT 2024 report, the share of companies with planned investments in cloud technologies in the 2025-26 biennium rises (29% vs. 26% those that have done so between 2021 and 2024); similar trend also for online sales support technologies (22% vs. 15%).

Also positively impacting the Digital Asset Management market is the increasingly widespread adoption of artificial intelligence technologies and, in particular, generative intelligence, of text but also of photos, video, and audio.

Trend that will mark an undeniable increase in digital assets in circulation, on the web and within organizations; particularly, as McKinsey confirms, in the very teams most involved in Digital Asset Management processes: Marketing, Sales, Product Development and IT.

Why go beyond DAM with a PXM

The most virtuous companies are even going beyond Digital Asset Management.

A software DAM, as mentioned, focuses on digital assets, thus adopting an internal point of view within the organization. Something similar to what Product Information Management tools do, where the focus is on product data.

This is an effective view, no doubt, but a partial one.

For some time now, not surprisingly, the focus has been shifting outward from organizations to the customer and, in particular, to the product experience.

How. With Product eXperience Management(PXM software) solutions, which combine DAM and PIM capabilities, multiplying benefits for the company and reducing IT costs by simplifying the company’s software stack.

Some key features of a PXM software

In addition to Digital Asset Management features of the Media Library section, SeeCommerce is a PXM software because it shifts the focus from individual content (or data) to catalogs and interaction with Web users (sites, e-shops, marketplaces).

In practical terms, a product’s data and all media content representing it converge into a single solution, zeroing out silos and costs to integrate DAM and PIM.

In particular, there are numerous features that enable you to go beyond a centralized media repository of classic Digital Asset Management software.
Here are a few:

• Product-Content Association and Product Content Syndication.
  Content is automatically correlated with the data of the products it represents, so publishing and updating of catalogs and product sheets are instantaneous (and very high-performance, thanks to the Content Delivery Network)

• Dynamic Asset Transformation.
  A PXM software dynamically adapts each piece of media content, based on e.g. format, size, background color required by individual web channels, cutting down manual optimization work and ensuring prestigious CX

• Shares to partners.
  Not only B2C touchpoints benefit from a PXM approach, but also B2B partners and, in general, stakeholders inside and outside the organization. How? With various features, one among them is Brand Portal.

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Between now and 2030, the EU ESPR Regulation will come into force, which, among other measures, includes the Digital Product Passport (or DPP).

What is the Digital Product Passport? What sectors does it cover? What impacts will it bring with it? In this article we take stock of the situation.

Digital Product Passport: what is the DPP

Let’s get straight to the point.

The acronym DPP stands for Digital Product Passport is a digital register containing a variety of information related to the value chain of an item.

Soon, European companies will have to accompany each product with a detailed list of data on its lifecycle, from production to recycling, through repairability and disposal.

Digital Product Passport: how does it work?

The fruition of DPPs will be clearer from the moment they see their full implementation, but it is likely that standards already in the market such as QR codes will be exploited to access a product’s digital passport.

Once scanned, the code will return to the consumer a set of detailed data on materials, composition, production cycle, varying from sector to sector.

What are Digital Product Passports for?

To understand the purpose of the digital passport produced, it should be mentioned that it is part of the ESPR regulation, approved in spring 2024.

ESPR stands for Ecodesign for Sustainable Product Regulation, a regulation that is part of the Green Deal, a package of EU initiatives to reduce emissions by at least 55 percent by 2030.

ESPR’s focus is to extend eco-design to most products on the EU market in order to reduce the environmental impact of their lifecycle, as is already the case with household appliances.

In addition, ESPR introduces new requirements and standards regarding durability, reparability, energy efficiency and recycling of items in order to counter planned obsolescence and promote circularity.

In this context, the DPP will serve as an informational reference point:

• for companies, which will have a lever of objective and concrete transparency
• for consumers to make more informed and green choices
• for the authorities-who by receiving the data to display in their portals-will be facilitated in controls and increase consumer confidence.

… okay but what about the competition?

Indeed, in the free market, companies’ duties of transparency may collide with the protection of competition.

The broad informational scope of the DPP, could compromise the confidentiality of strategic data, such as those related to production and procurement flows.

For this reason, the Legislature clarified that of all the information included in the DPP, only some will be accessible to consumers, while others will be accessible only by parties witha “legitimate interest,” as determined by the Regulation itself or by the Commission.

When will the Digital Product Passport be mandatory?

At least two steps are planned before the DPPs come into effect:

• the European Commission will present a three-year work plan in 2025, establishing the types of products affected by the regulation
• defined the types of products, a delegated act will be made for each of them, which will enshrine what data each sector must adhere to.

In general, the Digital Product Passport will become mandatory from 2027 for most industries, although there are exceptions.

Digital product passport: starting with batteries

From an initial analysis by the European Commission, the product categories first affected by the new Digital Product Passport appeared to be batteries, textiles, electronics and construction.

As of today, for one of them, the obligation is already fixed.

From 1 February 2027, in fact, battery companies for electric vehicles will have to provide – for every item with a capacity greater than 2kWh – a DPP with information on durability, performance and CO2 impact.

The EU has set up a single electronic battery register, in which the various digital product passports will converge for surveillance purposes.

Which sectors will be obliged to the digital product passport next?

A new study of the European Commission carried out at the end of 2024 by the Joint Research Centre, has identified the next product categories for which the digital product passport obligation is likely to be triggered:

• among final products: clothing, textiles and footwear, furniture, tyres, personal and household care and hygiene products, cosmetics, toys, paints, mattresses;
• among semi-finished products: basic chemicals, iron, steel, plastics and polymers, glass, pulp and paper.

In general, it is likely that the Digital Product Passport – precisely because of its capillarity objectives – will be extended to any other product sector, with a few exclusions (which will apparently concern foodstuffs, animal feed, vehicles and medicines).

What technology will the Digital Product Passport be based on?

Rumors agree that the technology that will enable the emergence of DPP will be blockchain, which is known to offer a digital infrastructure that provides security, transparency and immutability of every record entered by the various actors in an information chain.

By the way, digital passport in luxury fashion already exists

Fashion, particularly that which occupies the highest end of the market, has always been a forerunner of major digital developments.

Not surprisingly, it has also moved ahead at this juncture, through a consortium and voluntary membership project called Aura Blockchain.

The platform, developed by such giants as LVMH, OTB, Cartier and the Prada Group, offers traceability that shields consumers from counterfeits.

Tod’s, for example, has embedded an NFC (Non-Fungible Token) tag in its Di Bag that leverages the Aura project’s blockchain to return data to the customer-who scans it with his or her smartphone-that attests to the authenticity and provenance of the bag’s materials.

Image Source: Temera.com

49% of consumers already know what the digital product passport is

It is precisely fashion that appears to be the sector whose consumers are most ready.

Research reported by Forbes shows that half of the industry’s customers are familiar with the Digital Product Passport, who consider it a useful tool to certify brand authenticity (56%).

DPP: will companies need ad hoc software?

The management of DPP is closely related to that of product information and, in particular, its centralization, enrichment and delivery.

In view of the new obligation, it is clear that companies that are unstructured from a Product Information Management point of view will be able to seize the opportunity to equip themselves with PIM software-or better yet, PXM software.

Conversely, companies that have already embarked on such digital paths will need to ensure that the tools in use support the management and propagation of DPP data.

Our platform, for example, is SaaS, offers a hyper-flexible data model, and, thanks to APIs, delivers product content (data and media) across any channel. Key features to comply with future DPP obligations.

From regulatory obligation to business opportunity

DPPs are much more than a regulatory requirement.

Digital Product Passports, in fact, can be a useful tool for sharing information and documents that enrich the product experience through certified attestations of a brand’s quality authenticity.

It is also a democratic tool for promoting sustainability actions because the data travels on a third-party-guaranteed circuit, making it easier to detect greenwashing phenomena.

Last but not least, it can facilitate the sale of additional services or products such as repair, disposal, maintenance and repair items.

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