Your FREE Vendor Central: the Data-Entry Portal for All Your Retail Partners

In the recent roll-out with Aliexpress, Carrefour, Spanish hypermarket Alcampo, leading European IT distributor EET, Turkish retail giant Teknosa, Iberian Worten, and Poland’s leading marketplace Allegro, the Icecat PIM is promoted to all their vendors as their free Vendor Central. Hundreds of local brand reps have since then registered at Icecat PIM to add missing product content, such as marketing texts and localized PDFs. This is an approach that is embraced by more and more leading retailers and distributors. See here an overview of participants in the Free Vendor Central program.

Icecat PIM, the editorial backoffice of Icecat, is already in use by 100s of internal and external editors, including specialized or generic brand reps, often as part of an Open Icecat agreement.

Free Vendor Central

So what’s new? Now, the Icecat PIM is also available as a free-of-charge Vendor Central for brands. The main benefit for such brands is that they can cost-effectively optimize the buying experience of customers by offering to their retail partners complete product content with all data that helps a customer to make an informed buying decision, whereby the connected retailer is committed to transparently publish all the requested additional content on its website. Typically, localized images and PDFs are added. Better content leads to improved sales conversion, reversely, undescribed products don’t sell as they are often excluded from retailer catalogs.

So, what are the key benefits:

• Free-of-charge for brands
• Free-of-charge data for a retailer that has already a working Full Icecat integration
• Key retailer has committed to publish the additional vendor data on its websites, preferably near real-time or in daily updates
• Brand reps only need to add missing product content or missing digital assets, such as extra product images and PDFs, in the PIM back-office
• Easy-to-use editorial backoffice, stress tested and in use by 100s of users already
• Generic standardized taxonomy, maintained by Icecat, to allow product comparison by consumers
• Supports all types of content
• Multilingual interface

What is not standard included in the Free Vendor Central?

• API integrations with manufacturer databases
• Support of brand-specific taxonomies
• Open Icecat sponsorship by brands to allow free use of product content by any retail partner of the brand
• Brand-driven Digital Rights Management (DRM) for digital assets or private catalogs for authorized partners only
• A stand-alone multi-source PIM environment such as Iceshop PIM or Syndy’s PIM for brand/retailer template transformations

If you are interested to activate your own Free Vendor Central, to improve your brands’ product content, then don’t hesitate to contact us: