How Productsup supports kaiserkraft’s journey as an omnichannel leader in B2B retail

About kaiserkraft

kaiserkraft is one of Europe's leading omnichannel retailers for business, warehouse, and office equipment in the B2B sector and is based in Stuttgart. The company is part of the Industrial & Packaging (I&P) division of TAKKT AG and is represented in 18 European countries.

The kaiserkraft portfolio includes around 100,000 products for complete business equipment in the areas of office, transportation, warehouse, and workshop, as well as packaging. With its own production facility in Haan, the company has been creating customized products under its own eurokraft brand since 1954. kaiserkraft promises its customers "empowered to work best" and has set itself the goal of supporting companies in making their individual working environments more sustainable, efficient, safer, and more ergonomic, and to continuously improve them.

For most traditional B2B companies with large product portfolios, the complexity of their product data makes it extremely challenging to expand to new markets and channels, especially digital ones. Yet, kaiserkraft is renowned in the industry for their omnipresent retail approach.

What makes product data management so easy for the well-established player? It all starts with their journey with Productsup toward enhanced automation.

kaiserkraft before Productsup

Before working with Productsup, kaiserkraft relied on manual and siloed operations to import, manipulate, and export thousands of SKUs. This created substantial challenges that impeded efficiency and scalability. Specifically, they struggled with:

• Long processing time for eCatalog updates: From time to time, kaiserkraft needs to update over 350 eCatalogs for their customers with new product data, such as updated pricing. It would take them 6 hours per catalog to make the new information available to customers… that's a whopping 1,800 hours spent updating eCatalogs, which required their entire team's effort to complete. This also included manual post-processing. After exporting, for instance, a BMEcat file out of their PIM system, kaiserkraft would still need to search and replace some of the individual customer information. And for everyone on the team to be able to update an eCatalog, they had the tedious task of documenting every manual post-processing step along the way.
• Data silos from disparate tools: kaiserkraft’s team used multiple tools to provide product data for their SEO and SEA campaigns, leading to data silos, misinformation, and redundancies.
• Manual marketplace order entry: To sell on marketplaces, kaiserkraft had to manually enter all orders into their ERP system.

The major impact of these challenges? kaiserkraft’s provider systems, marketplaces, and even customers wanted to receive product data on a daily basis, but with all of the time required for a single export, delivering product content daily was impossible.

kaiserkraft with Productsup: Goals of the partnership

Then, in 2017, kaiserkraft decided to introduce the Productsup Product-to-Consumer (P2C) platform into its commerce operations. Driven by a commitment to innovation and efficiency, kaiserkraft articulated clear goals for the partnership.

• Less manual post-processing of customer eCatalogs
• Faster eCatalog updates: They wanted to update catalogs directly via the data feed system in a single click.
• Daily product data updates for marketplaces
• Automated performance marketing analysis: They wanted daily automation that would allow them to implement marketing strategies based on assortment performance to better allocate their budget.
• One tool for both SEO and SEA feeds
• Flexible data manipulation to provide any kind of data
• Pre-export check: They wanted to have a way to check the changed data directly in the feed system without triggering an export.

kaiserkraft with Productsup: Implementation of the platform’s key features

kaiserkraft uses Productsup across three departments: the eCatalog Services team, the Marketplace team, and the Performance Marketing team. The eCatalog Services team uses the platform to ensure seamless delivery of product assortments to customers through their eCatalogs, which contain product data in various formats (ie. Excel, CSV, BMEcat, etc.) The Marketplace team uses Productsup to access all the product data they need for the various marketplaces they sell on, as well as check special requirements for those channels, such as order transmission. And finally, Performance Marketing leverages the platform for all SEO and SEA campaigns.

In particular, kaiserkraft leverages the following capabilities as part of Productsup’s Advertising PX and Marketplaces PX offerings:

• “Rule box” optimizations: With a rule box to optimize product content for nearly every case, kaiserkraft can automate 99% of the manual post-processing steps for creating their eCatalogs.
• Import options: Productsup’s large number of import options and interfaces allows kaiserkraft to connect many of their systems and provide data in any form at any time.
• Export options: By bringing the eCatalog update process in one tool, kaiserkraft only has to click on the export button in the Productsup platform and the catalog can be sent directly to the customer.
• Scheduled daily updates to marketplaces: Due to the existing interfaces in Productsup to marketplaces, such as Mercateo or Meplato, kaiserkraft can provide a daily update of their data automatically.
• Separate “Projects”: The Marketplaces team has different data feed requirements than the eCatalog Services team, so they created separate projects to keep the different feeds organized. This also allows them to grant each team specific access to the relevant feed.
• Export previews: Through the platform’s Data View feature, kaiserkraft can preview manipulated data to detect and correct any errors before the catalog is exported.

kaiserkraft with Productsup: Tangible results

Since first setting out to transform its product data processes with Productsup, kaiserkraft has seen significant improvements in not only operational efficiency but also revenue growth. Key results of the partnership include:

• 68% increase in revenue from being able to focus investments on the best-performing products
• eCatalog update times dropped from 6 hours to 1 hour
• Marketplace order processing time now takes seconds instead of 10 minutes thanks to automatic imports into their ERP system

kaiserkraft with Productsup: Looking ahead

Together, kaiserkraft and Productsup will continue to perfect the product content journey. The mail-order company plans to expand their use of Productsup’s P2C capabilities, such as leveraging the platform’s Stream API to optimize data imports. They are also exploring Productsup’s CDE developer program to gain even more flexibility and independence in creating new import and export channels.

With Productsup serving as the backbone of their commerce operations, the long-standing B2B retailer is equipped to manage their omnichannel business with ease.