Salsify Announces Launch of the Salsify PXM Advance Platform, AI-Propelled for the 2nd Decade of the Digital Shelf

BOSTON, February 21, 2024 — Salsify, the Product Experience Management (PXM) platform empowering brand manufacturers, distributors, and retailers to win on the digital shelf, today announced the general availability of Salsify PXM Advance, a new version of the Salsify platform that raises the business value customers can achieve from their product experience management operations. The release features product advancements across AI and automation, efficiency improvements in governance and syndication, premium below-the fold Enhanced Content capabilities to drive increased conversion rates, and the introduction of the Salsify PXM App Center, a central homebase for PXM innovation from Salsify and their global network of partners.

The central goal of any brand’s PXM operations is to optimize every touchpoint on the digital shelf for maximum conversion. Accurate, complete product content that meets each retailer’s unique requirements are the essential foundation for driving retail media Return on Ad Spend (ROAS), search performance, and consumer confidence:

• A recent consumer survey found that 78% of shoppers find product images and descriptions extremely or very important to their buying journey.^1.
• In new omnichannel research released today from the Digital Shelf Institute and omnichannel research and advisory firm Stratably, 71% of digital leaders from 78 consumer brands believe Product Detail Page (PDP) quality significantly influences their ROAS.^2.

Salsify invested more than $20 million dollars in product investments in 2023 alone to deliver the capabilities designed for the scale, efficiency, and automation customers require across the PXM lifecycle. With the Salsify PXM Advance platform, brand manufacturers can:

• Centralize all of their product content into a trusted, central source of truth PIM that is unified with their syndication solution.
• Connect their content to every PDP on every destination their shoppers are at with conversion-driving product experiences that grow sales.
• Automate processes and reduce manual work with AI, workflows, and automation so they can be more efficient with their PXM operations.

Some of the new benefits included in Salsify PXM Advance include:

• Meet retailer requirements faster, spend more time selling: A redesigned product content setup process helps you send the right content the first time with significantly less mapping effort. Salsify PXM Advance now validates content against the latest retailer-specific requirements in real-time, saving customers days in the mapping process. A new Universal Properties capability gives every product on every channel an automated jump start with core approved data, dramatically speeding up the syndication process.
• Convert more shoppers: Salsify PXM Advance Enhanced Content makes it easier than ever to turn Product Detail Pages (PDP) into a conversion-driving product experience. Marketers and merchants can increase engagement on their PDPs at participating retailers with unlimited standard and premium layouts, including interactive comparison charts, image galleries, PDFs, video, and hotspots that drive 15% higher conversion rates on average. Integrated digital shelf reporting highlights conversion-driving best practices directly alongside where your product data is stored so you can optimize your content to increase discoverability, traffic, and conversion rates.
• Amp up success in Grocery: New with Salsify PXM Advance, the Salsify Grocery Accelerator is the industry’s first-ever category-wide PXM accelerator, designed specifically for the Grocery category’s unique data and compliance needs. We’ve developed a Grocery Category Guide, a collection of common category and regulatory data standards, and industry best practices. The Grocery Accelerator combines the Grocery Category Guide with AI-propelled automation, human expertise, and multiple levels of validation to syndicate accurate, validated, and high-quality product in less time than it previously took brands to reach just one.
• Improve GDSN time to market performance: Customers using Salsify’s unified, fully interoperable GS1-certified GDSN data pool have reported both a significantly accelerated submission process, and retailer feedback being received faster than with legacy data pool solutions. Salsify’s unified GDSN data pool now supports 9 countries, including US, Canada, Germany, Austria, Switzerland, Belgium, Netherlands, Luxembourg, and France, with many more to come.
• Generate content at scale with AI while keeping humans in the loop: In Salsify PXM Advance, generative AI LLMs are deeply integrated into Salsify’s workflows capability, enabling customers to create and refresh product content at scale while still ensuring efficient human review and approval prior to reaching the market. Additional integrations in the Salsify PXM App Center help you further leverage AI to generate content at scale. 
• Use AI-propelled content validations to improve quality and speed: The Salsify platform uses AI that is based on more than 740 million products published across 950 destinations worldwide in 2023 alone to power the real-time validation of product content, ensuring retailer requirements are met before submission. 
• Optimize the Conversion Impact of PDP Visual Content with AI: The Vizit Conversion Optimizer App in the Salsify App Center uses the power of AI to automatically identify the most appealing images and rearrange your carousel to maximize effectiveness with consumers. Customers increased conversions up to 10% with the Vizit Conversion Optimizer.
• Maintain accuracy and consistency across multiple regions or languages: Our Multi-Locale workflow monitors for updates to primary locale data and automatically triggers that enable local markets to maintain content accuracy across all regions.The Translate Task workflow supports source translation for up to three locales, for fast and efficient support of entire regions. 
• Manage and optimize PXM Ops at an enterprise scale: Due to its business impact, PXM platforms are taking their place alongside the core data systems of commerce like ERP, MDM, CRM, and DAM. Salsify PXM Advance features new Configuration Management APIs and multi-locale workflows that allow customer IT teams and their SI partners to set up, test, and manage Salsify instances at scale. This enables customers to accelerate the rate at which they govern global deployments and port configurations from one Salsify instance to another. Additionally, new Digital Shelf Operations Data Feeds allow customers to ingest digital shelf operations data into their own Business Intelligence environment to measure and optimize the efficiency and impact of their PXM operations.

PXM Innovation at Scale: Introducing the Salsify PXM App Center

With the new Salsify PXM App Center, customers will have instant access to a wide and ever-growing range of applications to extend and customize their Salsify PXM experience. The Salsify PXM App Center innovations help customers infuse AI and automation into their business processes, connect to new destinations, integrate their tech stack, and more.

The Salsify PXM App Center launches today with more than 40 applications from both Salsify and its global ecosystem of technology partners and system integrator partners building on top of the extensible Salsify platform. App categories include:

• Category Accelerators: Beginning with the Salsify Grocery Accelerator, these industry-specific apps leverage automation, AI, and category- and retailer-specific data quality validations to speed time to market and improve product page performance.
• Retailer and Distributor Destinations: Connect directly to retailer and distributor destinations to syndicate content. Destinations are kept up to date, so customers will always be working off of the latest retailer requirements, no matter how often they change. At launch, the Salsify PXM App Center features 16 direct top retailer destination connections including channels like Albertsons, Doordash, Uber, and Schnucks, with more to come from both Salsify and its partners. 
• Marketplace Destinations: The Salsify PXM App Center features Mamenta Marketplace Growth, an app built to sync catalog, inventory, orders, pricing, shipping and messaging data across multiple marketplaces from a single interface. The Mamenta app currently powers 13 different marketplace connections, including Rakuten, Costco Next, Coupang, Amazon, Flipkart and Walmart. 
• AI and Automation Extensions: Out-of-the-box configurations, workflow templates, and capabilities to jumpstart your digital shelf operations and automate routine tasks. Featured in this category is the Amazon Backfill Workflow, which automatically loads Amazon-defined product content directly into Salsify, ensuring accuracy and compliance with zero manual effort. Customers using this workflow saw a 25% average increase in publishing success.
• Integrations with Enterprise Systems: Integrations with other applications that are core to the commerce tech stack, such as Salesforce Commerce Cloud, Adobe, Shopify, BigCommerce, and multiple DAMs, so customers can centralize the tools, data, and context your teams need to deliver great product experiences.

The release of Salsify PXM Advance follows the company being named a “Leader” in Forrester’s market evaluation, “The Forrester Wave^™: Product Information Management, Q4 2023” which stated, “Salsify delivers on the promise of better product performance on commerce touchpoints. Salsify’s vision centers on mastering multichannel data management, automation, and AI.”  

The company’s position as a leader was further underscored by its acceptance into the MACH Alliance in 2023, validating the company’s future-proof, open, and supplier-friendly software.

Comments on the news

"The voices of our customers are the driving force of the new PXM Advance platform," said Julie Marobella, Chief Product Officer at Salsify. "The platform is designed to implement PXM innovations from Salsify and a global ecosystem of partners that allow our customers to take full advantage of the business opportunities in this second decade of PXM: operational excellence and sales performance improvements across every product page."

“Salsify’s new PXM Advance platform exemplifies the impact that AI and automation can have on product experience management operations,” said Heather Hershey,  Research Director for IDC’s Worldwide Digital Commerce practice. “Brand manufacturers’ digital commerce strategies must evolve beyond the ‘cold mechanics of technology’ in order to connect with consumers. Salsify PXM Advance enables Salsify’s customers to accelerate their PXM operations, driving product experiences on the digital shelf that will capture shoppers’ attention, loyalty, and trust.”

"For any Salsify customer that utilizes Salesforce to drive their Commerce & Customer 360 experience, we have a deep set of integrations to feed product content across multiple Salesforce Clouds to inform faster service, better marketing, and higher sales via great product content." said Andy Peebler, VP Product Strategy & Ecosystem Commerce Cloud at Salesforce.

“The Salsify PXM Advance platform App Center is the foundation for innovation in the Product Experience Management category,” said Steve Engelbrecht, CEO and Founder of Sitation, a Platinum Salsify Partner. “Our AI technology team is focused on delivering game-changing apps like RoughDraftPro, which is designed to solve difficult product data problems like channel-specific content creation, content scoring and analysis, and PDF attribute extraction. The Salsify App Center is a perfect way for us to connect with new customers and share the value of our technology quickly and easily."

For more information, visit www.salsify.com. 

1. “2024 Consumer Research.” Salsify. 2/07/2024
2. “DSI & Stratably Research: The Role of Product Detail Pages (PDPs) in Retail Media Budget Decisions.” Digital Shelf Institute (DSI) and Stratably. 2/13/2024

About Salsify

Salsify helps thousands of brand manufacturers, distributors, and retailers in over 140 countries collaborate to win on the digital shelf. The company’s Product Experience Management (PXM) platform enables organizations to centralize all of their product content, connect to the commerce ecosystem, and automate business processes in order to deliver the best possible product experiences across every selling destination.

Learn how the world’s largest brands, including Mars, L'Oreal, Coca-Cola, Bosch, and ASICS, as well as retailers and distributors such as DoorDash, E.Leclerc, Carrefour, Metro, and Intermarché use Salsify every day to drive efficiency, power growth, and lead the digital shelf. For more information, please visit: www.salsify.com.