If there is one thing that we have learned during COVID in the drinks industry, it is that many Australians need a drink to get through a pandemic.
The last 15 months’ events have resulted in a sharp acceleration in the growth of online liquor sales, with 2-3 years of growth compressed into a few months. Alcohol consumers’ spending habits have now fundamentally changed and will persist going forward.
As we slowly move out of COVID with businesses reopening and consumer confidence bouncing back, it is timely to examine if your e-commerce business is ready to capitalise on the post-COVID recovery.
Capitalising on the opportunity
COVID has made online shopping the norm. The benefit of ordering something from the comfort of your own home, with access to more product information than in the physical shop, and getting it delivered to your door, are the key drivers for the growth of online liquor shopping. Many consumers have discovered these benefits, and have changed their shopping habits for ever.
Whether you are a brand or a retailer, good product content is essential to capitalise on this opportunity.
Consumers are now demanding more product information online than in the offline environment, including multiple high quality images, a 360 degree view of the drink bottle, an engaging product description and product data, health ratings and reviews. Even if the purchase was made in store, research shows that consumers often have conducted extensive online research prior to making the physical purchase. The quality of your online presence really does drive offline sales.
However, many drinks retailers and brands have fallen short in providing informative and engaging product content. The shifts in buyer behaviour since COVID and the accelerating importance of e-commerce now make solving this an absolute imperative to maintain your market share, as opposed to ot being just a “nice to have”.
Getting ready for post-COVID recovery
With consumer confidence picking up, now is the perfect time to ensure that your products have all the product information that consumers may require, so that retailers may access this and present it to their shoppers.
SKUvantage can provide a full turnkey solution to this challenging problem, and is the industry leading expert in creating professional, high quality digital product content in all the above mentioned categories. We also work closely with leading drinks retailers to deliver better product information to their customers.
The SKUlibrary platform provides the opportunity for hundreds of smaller bottle shops in Australia and New Zealand to easily source our brand clients’ product content through manual download. Other retailers use SKUlibrary for both product information management technology, and to provide feeds of our brand clients’ product content to their business systems.
A holistic business solution for brands, retailers and distributors
Beyond delivering product content to retailers, SKUlibrary also helps solve the problem of how to ensure brand and retailer teams are operating from the same version of images and product information.
For brands, SKUlibrary is an intuitive, easy to use single source of truth for product content that gets your colleagues out of using risky and inefficient spreadsheets and shared drives to manage product data and images. Sharing product content through SKUlibrary gives hundreds of retailers access to your product content with ease. Feeds from SKUlibrary save time and effort loading content into B2B e-commerce platforms, brand sites and other internal systems, making tasks easier to perform and driving business efficiency, as outlined here. These benefits are enjoyed by all the major liquor brands in Australia.
For retailers, SKUlibrary can be used as a low cost, easy to use Product Information Management (PIM) platform, with readily available product content fed directly from your vendors’ SKUlibrary catalogues into your version of SKUlibrary. You can also get a feed of product content into your own systems, even if you don’t use SKUlibrary as your PIM. And if we don’t already have the product content, we can source it exclusively for you using our SKUcapture service.
This means your product content is accurate and up to date, without the effort and complexity usually associated with managing product content across thousands of products. SKUlibrary is used in the way by numerous retailers - read more here.
To help brands and retailers achieve a digital presence with minimal effort, the SKUvantage solution suite also provides services including product photography, product renders, product data enrichment, product videos and beyond. Check out some of our work here.
Moving forward
As you can see, no matter the nature of your business or your requirements, we can provide a solution to help you take advantage of liquor e-commerce opportunities. We have numerous examples of how this one stop shop of technology and services reduces the effort for teams in giving retailers and consumers the product information they need.
Whether you are already a client of SKUvantage or not, feel free to contact us for a further conversation to learn how you can reduce effort for your teams in giving consumers the information they need in this critical time of economic recovery. Email us here.
SKUvantage is an Associate Member of the Drinks Association.