Content as a Service – An Introduction

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As we dive deeper into the digital age, it becomes more apparent each day that online retail is the dominant outlet for consumers looking to purchase products. As technology continues to connect our world, it’s now possible to purchase almost anything from the palm of our hands and have it delivered to our doorstep in as little as 24 hours. Consumers now have access to hundreds of thousands of online store fronts, making it ever more challenging for online retailers to truly stand out and be successful in a vast sea of competition.

So how exactly do these online retailers complete? What can these online retailers do exactly to stand out from the crowd? As technology continues to advance, those who seek fortune through an online webstore need to focus on a key aspect of their service – the buying experience.

The buying experience for customers has never been more important in online retail than it is now. With hundreds of thousands of storefronts competing, how much of an impact you make on potential shoppers is equally – if not more – important than the product offering.

This is where Content as a Service (CaaS) comes into play.

What is Content as a Service (CaaS)?

Content as a Service is an ever-growing industry with one key focus – improving the buying experience for online customers. With online shopping, it’s no longer about physically going to our favorite store to buy a product. Now, it’s about finding the right online store with the right buying experience to give us the confidence we need to buy from that webstore.

Shoppers can find a single item on hundreds of different webstores across the world, many of which have the same price and same delivery options. So how does an online webstore flourish and attract customers? By improving and enhancing the customers buying experience!

Do they provide clear, concise information about the product? Is enough information provided for the buyer to make a confident buying decision? Is the store easy to navigate and find products? These are just some of the questions – and problems – Content as a Service works to resolve.

What does Content as a Service do for online retailers?

Whether a webstore is sells power tools, janitorial supplies, electronics or office supplies, everything starts with product data. This product data includes both logistical information such as unit of measure, shipping dimensions and pricing to marketing information such as product selling copy, feature/bullet points, images, and brochures. Content as a Service focuses on ensuring that these aspects are presented to customers in a clean, clear and concise fashion that increases the customer’s confidence in purchasing the product.

This may be something as simple as standardizing specific data points across a webstores catalog to ensure nothing is misrepresented or misinterpreted by the customer; or, it could be something as large as restructuring a webstores category structure to provide a faster and more streamlined shopping experience.

At the end of the day, Content as a Service should focus on one key aspect of a webstore – improving the overall shopping and buying experience for customers!