E-Commerce | Epic Product Descriptions | Content Quality
The 5 Key Trends in E-Commerce Content Management
Reading Time 4 mins | September 27, 2024 | Written by: Heike Hoppmann
In the fast-paced world of e-commerce, demands on product communication and content management are evolving rapidly. Companies face the challenge of creating consistent, efficient, and high-quality content. Recent trends highlight how central management, automation, and quality assurance are revolutionizing content work and setting new standards. But how can companies leverage these trends to optimize their product content?
Here are the five key trends in e-commerce content management and strategies to successfully integrate these trends into your content strategy.
1. Unified Management and Collaboration of Content Processes
In modern e-commerce companies, content is created in many places and handled by different teams with different technology: marketing, product management, translation teams, SEO experts, and more. Without centralized management, content creation becomes complex, error-prone, and misses huge potential. This impacts the quality and, ultimately, the product description's value for consumers. For those responsible for product content, finding systematic approaches to holistically optimize product communication and demonstrate its impact on business success becomes increasingly difficult.
As a result, product content is often produced with high effort, but cost and benefit are rarely monitored. A data-driven, holistic view of product communication —regardless of which team, method, or technology is used—can help identify systematic approaches to effective and successful product communication.
2. AI-Powered Text Creation and Automation
Artificial intelligence (AI) is fundamentally changing the way content is created. Text generation, supported by technologies such as Large Language Models (LLMs) and Data2Text automation, enables faster and more precise text creation. These technologies can analyze large data sets, extract relevant information, and generate customized texts tailored to the needs of the target audience.
The use of AI and automation significantly reduces manual effort and speeds up the creation of product descriptions, category texts, and other content. Companies benefit from the speed and flexibility of these technologies, elevating text creation to a new level.
3. Quality Assurance and Impact Measurement
Creating content is only the first step. Ensuring high quality and measuring the effectiveness of the texts are crucial to achieving the desired customer engagement. Quality assurance tools check texts for spelling, grammar, style, and other individually defined criteria, but they also have their limits. Often, companies have their own defined rules that serve as quality criteria and need to be verified.
Beyond general and custom-defined quality criteria, performance is a key quality indicator. This metric indicates whether the content is genuinely useful to consumers. Analyzing text impact helps companies identify areas for improvement and optimize their texts accordingly. This makes product communication not only high-quality but also measurably more successful.
4. Flexibility in Text Creation
The requirements for product texts vary greatly depending on the channel, target audience, product, and category. Therefore, it’s essential to remain flexible in text creation. The ability to choose between manual creation, AI support, and Data2Text automation provides the flexibility needed to meet specific requirements.
Companies can select the best method based on their needs: manual text creation offers the greatest control, while automated processes provide quick and scalable solutions. This flexibility helps deliver the right content at the right time, effectively engaging customers. It’s essential, however, to prevent silos from forming through the use of different technologies and ensure that all content creation methods are integrated.
5. Translation Management and Internationalization
With globalization, the demand for efficient translation management is growing. Product descriptions often need to be available in multiple languages to cater to international markets. Centralized translation management tools support the administration and quality assurance of multilingual content, helping to maintain consistency across all markets. Companies increasingly rely on tools that enable centralized management of translations for large volumes of text.
One of the major challenges in translation is quality assurance. Effectively addressing cultural and linguistic differences in product texts is crucial for establishing credibility in the market. Therefore, companies are turning to tools that allow native speakers to efficiently manage data translations and quickly edit AI-generated drafts across a large volume of texts.
Conclusion: Successfully Managing Content in E-Commerce
The trends in e-commerce content management demonstrate that central management, automation, quality assurance, and flexibility are crucial factors in creating effective and efficient product communication. Companies that embrace these trends can optimize their content processes and elevate their product texts to the next level. To create product communication that is efficient and demonstrably impactful, companies need an objective overview of all product content and its creation.
The future of e-commerce content management is flexible, collaborative, and data-driven—and companies that adopt these trends will be well-equipped to meet tomorrow’s challenges.
Heike Hoppmann
Heike Hoppmann believes in the power of words. The use of words can be creative, but above all it must be purposeful. Writing is not an end in itself. As a mentor and coach for editorial management and digital transformation processes, she has successfully conveyed this idea to many online editors. And today it is the guiding principle of her work as PR Manager at AX Semantics GmbH.