Salsify Review- Best Product Experience Management Platform 2019

Catalog management is a dynamic process where products are organized in a specific way to ensure consistent and high-quality data across all sales channels.

An online catalog provides product names, descriptions, hierarchy, price, supplier and other related details. Within those categories, granular details like color, style, pattern, neckline, sleeve, length and fit need to be accurate in order for customers to be directed to the right product.

Catalogs are created by tagging products based on various attributes used to classify & group products. These tags need to be consistent, SEO ready & descriptive. As in, they need to be what people search for.

An article in the Harvard Business Review stated that the yearly cost of poor quality data in the US alone was $3.1 trillion in 2016. Thanks to bad data, they’re losing opportunities for revenue. The more organized a catalog’s data is, the more it helps businesses in marketing their products across platforms and expands product discovery, which is an avenue for sales conversion.

Here are the five biggest challenges faced by catalog managers of large brands or e-commerce websites on a daily basis.

  1. Delayed product onboarding and go-to-market strategy
  2. Manual tagging for large catalog sizes impacts accuracy
  3. Inaccurate tags impact product discovery
  4. Inability to create rich metadata for products on a scale
  5. Lack of real-time visibility into inventory and inability to analyze and react to demand

Catalog management is a strategic process that renders a well-organized, information-rich product catalog. Furthermore, it helps the e-store owners to ensure a quality flow of product data across multiple sales channels.

What is Salsify

Salsify is a tool that empowers brand manufacturers to deliver the product experiences consumers demand anywhere they choose to shop online. The software leverages product is a digital asset and product information management tool rolled into one and is able to orchestrate compelling product experiences through every digital touchpoint.

Salsify PXM customers cut across a range of verticals and company sizes, including some of the largest companies in the world, many of which use Salsify everyday to stand out on the digital shelf. At the same time, Salsify has a very flexible approach to data modelling, and is designed to fit and adapt seamlessly inside any ecosystem.

Salsify is a cloud based content management as well as syndication solution provider that helps eCommerce companies, marketing companies, and most importantly sales teams in centralizing, collaborating, and publishing customized product content for all possible channels. This translates in better business discoverability, sales prospects, and customer satisfaction.

4 main features of Salsify are catering content requirements in accordance with unique needs of retailers, ability of creating excellent content by using user-friendly tools, mapping of content needs and publication in all channels, and quick creation and delivery of content as per schedule.

Overview of Salsify Benefits

Salsify PXM software unites the functionalities of product information management (PIM) and digital asset management (DAM) platforms, to help sellers provide online shoppers with rich customer experiences anywhere in cyberspace. Unlike a traditional PIM vendor, Salsify has a flexible approach to data modeling. Turning multiple sources of data into consumer-ready content, and then into sales, is no easy task. Salsify allows brands to load data, as-is, from anywhere to anywhere. There’s no big data integration project required up front. Instead, brand manufacturers can import and create any content, from any source, and improve it in place and over time according to the requirements they set. Salsify software then quickly assesses if the content meets the requirements of every sales channel the brand publishes to. The platform acts as a single trusted source of content, able to accommodate multiple versions of the truth, for any endpoint.

For those sales channels, Salsify integrates with a wide array of APIs and scheduled imports and exports. The software is designed to receive data from any source and send product content to any system, in the optimal format for each channel. All data is transmitted with complete visibility as to what content is where, and its status. Salsify connects to ERPs, legacy product information management systems, retailer and distributor portals, content agencies, analytics providers, ecommerce platforms, ratings and reviews sites, and more. Customers can also create and share digital product catalogs that are automatically updated and allow users to download the content they need.

As a SaaS platform, future functionality and experience improvements do not require an upgrade or install. In addition, Salsify applies machine learning across the millions of products in its multi-tenant database, generating category- and product-level content performance insights to inform future product content refreshes and drive more sales.

The Salsify platform is also enabled with scalability and security features that meet the demands of the world’s largest global corporations. Salsify is built on an elastically scalable infrastructure designed to scale with any organization whether they are managing 100 products or 100 million. Constantly updated platform security functionality includes single sign-on capabilities, data encryption, a robust set of user roles and permissions, and an account-specific security infrastructure.

Salsify Features:

  • Product content creation and publication
  • Rapid SKU introduction
  • Content collaboration
  • Content optimization
  • Content syndication
  • Product information management
  • Digital asset management
  • Content readiness
  • Digital product catalogs
  • Content analytics
  • Content onboarding
  • Product information management
  • Multi-tenant SaaS
  • Audit trails

Architecture:

To meet data and customer experience demands on existing and new channels, your processes and systems must be flexible, agile, and rapidly adaptable.

Salsify was built for fast data management to allow brands to move with agility, manage complexity, and overcome organizational barriers within a single PXM platform.

Great product information and content
  • Fast data management across your data domains
  • Relevant access for business user, IT, C-suite and third-parties
  • Data modeling that doesn’t impose one version of the truth
  • Governance to guide your data quality, without hampering agility
Activate data in every shopping experience
  • Updated data requirements for every channel
  • Alerts on product content readiness and compatibility
  • Deliver enhanced content at scale from a centralized platform
Make the right improvements
  • View what’s working and what’s not on the digital shelf
  • Capture relevant signal information in the core data platform
  • Kick-off workflows right in the platform with digital shelf eventing
  • Bring external signals and analytics into the platform

Platform Details:

Salsify is a set of microservices to easily maintain compatibility with everything you need to manage your product experience on the digital shelf from one platform. The secure cloud-based, multi-tenant software-as-a-service enables dynamic scaling and rapid deployments.

Scalability and flexibility
  • Built on a cloud-based multi-tenant software architecture
  • i18N allows for the localization any global business requires
Rapid innovation
  • Cloud-based Saas platform, eliminates costly and time-consuming upgrades
  • Leverage REST and Graph QL APIs to meet unique business needs
Built-in security

All the security benefits you get with a cloud platform, including SOC 2 Type 2 compliance.

Permissive Validation
  • Governance rules, specifiable to an individual user, action and entity
  • Readiness assessments for each product, with drill-down details
  • Import data directly into the platform without heavy schema and data cleansing pre-work

Pricing:

Salsify doesn’t publish its subscription plans on its website and employs a customized pricing scheme. Interested users can get in touch with Salsify to request for a quotation specific to their business needs. Estimated prices for similar apps range from $25 to $120/user/month depending on the features included.

Contact Salsify for enterprise pricing information and other product details. You can also submit a request for a free trial to see if the software is a perfect fit for your business.

The 30-day free trial enables users to experience Salsify’s full version. It includes all essential features such as data import, authoring workflow set up, retailer feed publishing, and more.

  • Free Trial Available? Yes
  • Does not have feature Free or Freemium Version Available? No
  • Has feature Premium Consulting/Integration Services Available? Yes
  • Entry-level set up fee? No

Support options:


Free Version Paid Version
Phone Yes Yes
Live Chat Yes Yes
Email Yes Yes
FAQ/Knowledgebase Yes Yes
Video Tutorials / Webinar Yes Yes
Supported Countries

Asia, Australia, Brazil, Canada, China, Europe, Germany, India, Japan, Latin America, Mexico, Middle-East and Africa, United Kingdom, United States

Supported Languages

Arabic, Chinese (Simplified), Chinese (Traditional), Czech, Danish, Dutch, English, Finnish, French, German, Hebrew, Hungarian, Indonesian, Irish, Italian, Japanese, Korean, Norwegian, Polish, Portuguese, Russian, Spanish, Swedish, Taiwanese, Thai, Turkish, Ukrainian

Integrations:

Some best integration supported by Salsify are:

  • Microsoft Dynamics
  • Dropbox
  • Box
  • Okta
  • NetSuite
  • Shopify Plus
  • Webcollage
  • OneSpace
  • Magento
  • Kwikee
  • CatalogSync
  • Centrify
  • Drupal
  • 1WorldSync
  • Clavis Insight

Competitors:

Pimcore

Pimcore is another powerful platform that goes beyond PIM to offer customer experience management, master data management, digital asset management, and ecommerce. Where its unique is that its open-source edition is completely free for companies with strong computer engineering prowess. In their FAQs, Pimcore even states that it’s built for developers and will not usable for most organizations right out of the box. Anyone who’s interested in Pimcore is going to need access to a developer—likely on an ongoing basis.

While their open-source edition is free, Pimcore does offer annual Enterprise and Cloud editions starting at $2,000 USD per year. These editions are where customers gain access to consulting, implementation, and other partner services; which is where Pimcore says it makes its real money.

Akeneo

Akeneo is another open-source solution that focuses on providing deep product information management instead of every single ecommerce feature under the sun—which is a strategy we can certainly get behind as one of the simplest, best tools for managing product data.

Ease of use is one of the things reviewers like the most about their experience with Akeneo, followed by its robust feature list and ability to operate in several languages. The biggest con seems to be the lack of implementation support and ongoing guidance for those using the free Community Edition

As an open-source software, it’s no surprise that Akeneo offers several consulting and training services. They also have some interesting products like the “mini-PIM” Onboarder for suppliers, a fashion accelerator, and a mysterious product intelligence platform.

Plytix

Plytix’s Centralize, Optimize, Distribute, and Analyze (CODA) framework is built for content people, not IT people. Regardless of the size of team or your technology capabilities, Plytix PIM helps online brands and retailers solve their most time-consuming pain points and improve revenue per employee.

They also strive to make pricing as easy to understand as the software. Their free version is great for small to medium-sized businesses, pro version has everything a growing business and enterprise needs for $1,000 USD a month, and they put together custom packages as per user need.

Not only is Plytix the most affordable PIM software on the market, users can subscribe on a month-to-month basis and never pay extra for things that shouldn’t cost extra—like implementation support, adding extra users, and unlimited file storage.

Conclusion:

We realize that when you make a decision to buy e-Commerce Software it’s important not only to see how experts evaluate it in their reviews, but also to find out if the real people and companies that buy it are actually satisfied with the product. That’s why we recommend you to gather customer reviews, comments and Salsify reviews across a wide range of social media sites. With that information at hand you should be equipped to make an informed buying decision that you won’t regret.

With the help of Salsify, businesses can embrace requirements of specific retailer and accordingly deliver content for meeting those specific needs. Sales teams and marketing professionals need to address consumers’ requirements. In fact, product contents are not created by IT teams but by the ones who visit market. They need user friendly as well as powerful tools for creating content. This is where Salsify helps them.

Salsify helps professionals and businesses identify gaps, direct connections towards their specific needs, and most importantly make the process transparent. This helps them cater to the content needs of tradeshows, marketplaces, retailers, data pools, and others. One of the most important features of Salsify is ability to create content fast and that’s too in an accurate manner so that product content requirement can be delivered on a round the clock basis and on schedule. Therefore, with Salsify by your side, you can convert product management from administrative burden to competitive advantage by creating and publishing high quality content easily and quickly.

All these cutting edge content solutions of Salsify has helped many businesses in meeting their respective endeavors. Some of the most renowned clients of Salsify include Bosch, Marbles, Reckitt Benckiser, Hospira, Energizer, Jarden Corporation, Drive, Rubbermaid, Essendant, Smead, and many more.