Why Product Share?

E-commerce sales will reach $547b in two years and account for almost 20% of retail sales. But many indie businesses have given up on adding items to their websites. Why? There is no standard in our industry for how to format Excel files or share images. This is ruining retailers as the world becomes more digital.

In the last 20 years, there has been little change in how stores add items to their website. Stores must still work with Excel files, process images, and use software programs to shoehorn items on to their sites.

Let's look at an example: there are thousands of brands exhibiting at AmericasMart. Almost every brand formats their Excel file differently. Imagine you're a store that sells 100 of these brands. You want to add them to your website in order to compete with Amazon and get your share of the $547b market. But, you would have to deal with 100 different Excel file formats. Then, you'd have to format thousands of images that are shared differently via Dropbox, Box, and other file sharing platforms.

Result: you would have to deal with almost infinite variations of how to receive and process this product data. You don't have the manpower or money to do this. Therefore, you give up. You don't add the items to your website. This is what 99% of indie stores have done.

This has produced a clear winner: Amazon. Amazon has cornered 47% of the e-commerce market by adopting different techniques and business models to add hundreds of millions of items to its website. It can do this because, unlike indie stores, it has access to hundreds of millions of dollars that pay for powerful software and ample staff. This has positioned Amazon to capture 90% of the $547b e-commerce market. Put another way, since Amazon has the technology to format the Excel sheets and process the images, it wins.

This leads to the question: what if there was an easier way for indie stores to share product data? If there was such a solution, then we'd all stand a better chance of saving time, saving money, and increasing what is on our websites. We'd have a chance to win more online customers and stop Amazon's growth.

What if there was a standard for how to organize products and share them? What if this standard was free and open source?

We created Product Share to be this answer. We believe the Product Share framework will help you and our industry save time and money. It will help stores and brands more easily add items to their websites.

We created Product Share based upon our 10 years of organizing our industry's data. Bridge has helped businesses sell $50m online, and we know what it takes to organize data. Bridge currently helps more than 400 retailers manage 120,000 products from 2,000 brands. Bridge is giving the Product Share framework away at no charge using the Creative Commons License. This framework of standards can be used for any product, by any business, for free.

We have identified the six key areas needed to share product data:

• Products
• Departments
• Brands
• Images
• SKUs
• Software

Please explore the Product Share site. How can we make it better? Please share your ideas here: [email protected].

We plan to enhance Product Share over time and make sharing data easier and easier. This will provide more online sales for indies stores and help our industry.

Shop indie,

Jason Solarek
CEO
Bridge
339 East 9th St., NYC 10003
1-212-254-9654