How Thalia distributed data to sales channels 85% faster using the Productsup P2C Platform

Case

Thalia is a medium-sized, independent family company founded in 1919 with headquarters in Hagen, Germany. As a successful omnichannel bookseller, Thalia consistently creates excellent shopping experiences for their customers – in bookstores or online. They offer content in all available delivery formats: physical books, ebooks, and audiobooks. With around 360 bookstores in Germany and Austria, they continue to grow their business steadily. Thalia was a founding member of the alliance that launched the Tolino e-Reader in 2013. The Tolino currently boasts a 44%* share of the German-speaking ebook reader market.

Thalia’s ambitious five-year plan is to double its customer base and halve the number of non-readers in the general public. They rely on the Productsup P2C platform to enable them to achieve sustainable growth and deliver tailored product offers and excellent customer experiences to more consumers.

*Financial year 2020/21

Challenges

• Outdated feed setup
• Long feed processing times
• No insights or control of feed management

Thalia faced several challenges with their feed setup. As they grew, their product data needed to be synchronized with their sales and advertising channels quickly.

With an extensive product catalog of 10–13 million items, it took Thalia 12 hours to prepare feeds for publication on various sales channels. This lengthy delay was due to the need to retrieve product data from different internal systems, i.e., their ecommerce/IT department and SAP database. The data was then submitted to a feed management agency, followed by a SEA agency who adjusted and exported it to the respective channel in this case Google.

Thalia basically lacked insights and control over what was happening with their product data. They couldn’t customize or change feeds on short notice without tech support or using costly third-party providers. They also needed to speed up feed processing and reduce costs.

Solutions

• Internal feed setup
• Full control over product feeds
• Flexibility and scalability

After extensive research, Thalia decided that Productsup offered the most comprehensive feed management solution. In less than one day, Thalia moved their entire feed setup from an agency to the Productsup P2C platform. Using the Productsup P2C platform, they now have complete control over their feeds. This allows them to decide which products are promoted on which channel at what time.

The Productsup P2C platform also enables Thalia to deliver accurate product data to buyers faster. This ensures that the end-consumer always sees the current price and availability of the products they are browsing.

The P2C platform’s flexibility means that Thalia can integrate multiple data import and export channels, such as Google Cloud Platform, SAP ERP, and web analytics and easily manage large amounts of data in a scalable and targeted manner.

Results

• Independence from third-party providers
• Detailed performance insights
• Faster feed updates

Thanks to the Productsup P2C platform, Thalia now has complete control over its product data feeds. Feed adjustments and analyses are possible ad hoc without having to rely on feedback from an external agency. In addition, they can use the product data to decide which products they want to promote and thus quickly remove unprofitable products from their promotions.

Adjustments and updates to product data feeds can now be made much faster. As a result, Thalia has increased their data distribution efficiency by 85% as compared to the time spent when working with a third-party agency. They can now update 2.5 million products in the German market every two hours which means their product data and order synchronization is always up to date. On their Swiss market, they can update 13 million products twice a day.

Moreover, Thalia can now integrate several other data sources such as Google data sheets to their feeds and enrich their product data with even more information, ensuring great customer experiences.

Future plans

In the future, Thalia plans to further integrate the Productsup P2C platform into more of their existing processes. This includes plans to start selling on marketplaces like Amazon and eBay.