Managing product data efficiently for over 100 channels in seven countries
New partners
onboarded in approximately 1-2 days
Approx. 30 minutes
to launch a simple product exports
Diverse range
of over 150,000 products
About
Over 20 years ago, a young pharmacist in a local pharmacy in Cologne, Germany, had the groundbreaking idea of digitizing his family business. Today, Redcare Pharmacy is the leading online pharmacy in Europe, bringing brands like Shop Apotheke, Shop Pharmacie, Farmaline, Redcare, GoPlus, nu3, smartpatient, and medapp under one roof.
With nearly 12 million active customers in Germany, Austria, France, Belgium, Italy, the Netherlands, and Switzerland, Redcare Pharmacy has a diverse range of over 150,000 products. These products include over-the-counter medicines, dietary supplements, beauty and personal care products, as well as an extensive range of health articles. In Germany specifically, the online pharmacy also offers prescription medicine.
Challenge: Managing omnichannel sales and channel diversity
Consumers find their way to Redcare Pharmacy’s brands following different paths. While omnichannel distribution offers more sales opportunities, the growing diversity of channels also brings a number of challenges. As attractive as it is to be able to reach customers almost anywhere with brand and product information, the cross-platform, synchronized provision of this data is becoming increasingly complex. The information must be prepared differently for each channel in order to meet both the specific requirements of the channel and varying consumer preferences.
Goal: A consistent customer experience across all touchpoints
“We see ourselves as a partner for all kinds of health issues. Our vision is to support everyone in living as healthy as possible. 'Until every human has their health' is our mission statement,” says Aljoscha Krawulsky, Senior Marketing Technology Manager at Redcare Pharmacy. ”In addition to a broad product range, it’s important to build a trusting relationship with our customers. That's why we want to create a consistent customer experience across all touchpoints and guide customers to our products via the topics that interest them – without them having to click through numerous pages.”
Solution: Product-to-consumer (P2C) management helps to overcome complexity in retail
However, each of these consumer touchpoints requires data to be prepared and optimized differently for each channel and target market.
“We are represented in almost all continental European countries with different product ranges. In each country, we communicate information about the various platforms via dozens of different channels. And these channels in turn have different requirements, both in terms of the type of data required and the product ranges that can be offered there,” explains Aljoscha Krawulsky.
Redcare Pharmacy distributes product information via country-specific websites, such as shop-apotheke.com, redcare-pharmacie.fr, shop-apotheke.at, redcare.it , farmaline.nl, and smartpatient.eu. It also manages information across other channels, like online marketplaces, price search engines, social media platforms, newsletters, and affiliate marketing.
Redcare Pharmacy uses Productsup's product-to-consumer (P2C) software to gain visibility over the entire product content journey and update data in real-time.
“Without Productsup, it would be impossible to manage the huge volume of data for our 150,000+ products and get it to the right place at the right time, while maintaining accuracy and consistency across several hundred channels,” confirms Aljoscha Krawulsky.
Many channels, feeds, and data sets
The data from Redcare Pharmacy is merged in Productsup so that a data record with all relevant attributes is available for each product. The data is imported via a complex system that collects data from various sources, aggregates it, and forwards it to Productsup. Several million data records are processed via the P2C platform.
“The data set can be information on one product in three countries for five channels,” explains Aljoscha Krawulsky. Billions of data records are exported to our partners several times a day via 100 channels and several hundred feeds.
For partners integrated directly with Productsup, Redcare Pharmacy defines an algorithm once – which data is required from the respective partner and in which format. Smaller partners who are not directly connected to Productsup, receive a data export in .csv, .xlsx, or JSON format, which is stored on the Productsup server and can be accessed by the partners via a URL.
High-quality data through automated monitoring
Productsup’s automated monitoring feature allows Redcare Pharmacy to monitor individual data streams according to defined rules. Alerts can be sent directly within the Productsup platform, by email, or via internal collaboration platforms.
“For example, we have set up an alert that automatically notifies us if there are anomalies in imports,” explains Aljoscha Krawulsky. “Another example is incomplete data or data with characters that cannot be processed, which can be easily corrected with the help of automatic mapping.”
Aljoscha Krawulsky and his colleagues hardly ever need support when managing their feeds: “99.9% of the functionalities are very easy for end users to implement on their own. This is partly due to the intuitive user interface and partly because IT doesn't need to be involved in building the feeds.” Productsup also provides new employees with a basic understanding of the solution as part of the onboarding process.
Future-proof investment
Redcare Pharmacy has been using Productsup for several years, proof of the high scalability of the P2C platform, as the number of products and channels has steadily increased over the years.
“Our setup back in the initial kickoff with Productsup was much smaller. We used far fewer channels in Germany and uploaded our data slowly,” summarizes Aljoscha Krawulsky. “Today, we are Europe's leading online pharmacy and a member of the M-Dax. We use a much more efficient connection and supply dozens of channels with data on 150,000 products in seven countries. Productsup has continued to advance its platform over the past few years, keeping pace with our growth. With Productsup, we are confident that we will continue to be well positioned for efficient product data feed management.”
“Productsup is our core solution for efficiently organizing, optimizing, and distributing accurate, relevant data on our more than 150,000 products to various channels in seven countries.”