Walker Edison Quickly Went Live on 10 Retailer Channels By Centralizing Data With Channel-Specific Properties in Salsify
Schaugaard chose Salsify in 2021 for its scalable syndication capabilities and ability to store all the product information for nearly 1,800 products — including 150,000 digital assets — in one place.
Walker Edison worked with the technical implementation agency and Salsify partner Aleysian to help structure its data and launch on 10 retail channels within six months.
The company went live on several major retailers, including Target, Amazon, Wayfair, Best Buy, The Home Depot, and Overstock.
To implement all of the existing content at once, the team first adopted a consistent naming convention for digital assets and decided on a property structure for product information.
Schaugaard’s team is part of the sales group. Each team member manages one of the company’s top six retailer accounts and one or two retailers from the top 15. This organizational structure allowed the team to focus on implementing new channels simultaneously rather than one channel at a time.
With help from the Aleysian team, who built out their initial channels and channel mappings, the team was able to build on their knowledge and expertise to clean up product data and service their retailers independently.
Salsify’s ability to handle thousands of properties made it easier for the group to customize the content they send to each retailer. Most properties are based on retailer requirements, including category-specific ones.
For example, a fireplace product listing would require information such as how big of a room it will heat, what kind of controls it has, and what kind of safety features it includes.
Self-Service Product Catalogs Support Smaller Retailers
Walker Edison uses digital catalogs to service some of its smaller partners. Partners can find items by category or by looking through the full catalog to identify the items that they want to sell.
Partners can use export capabilities to access all the product information and corresponding digital assets needed to create a listing for their sites.
The Walker Edison team maintains an active catalog with the latest items. Partners and sales team members can hone in on the item they want by searching the catalog for a landing date or other useful parameters.
Salsify’s formula capabilities made it possible to include thumbnail images in product exports, which increased the ease of ordering. Walker Edison can also now quickly communicate with retailers that aren’t partnered with Salsify.
After the team successfully centralized all of their product information and digital assets and went live on priority channels with core product content, they set a new goal to include enhanced content for all of their product listings.
They created specific brand layouts for each retailer partnered with Salsify and syndicated it to all active listings. In 2023, the team plans to build on this by establishing a more tailored approach to enhanced content for specific SKUs.
"The thing that really attracted us to Salsify was that it was both a PIM [product information management] and a DAM [digital asset management], meaning we could manage our product data and digital assets in the same platform. We liked that we could not only syndicate to the direct connection retailers but could build custom channels easily as well."
— Jill Schaugaard, Content Manager, Walker Edison
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