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DataKart – by the industry, for the industry

In retailing, accurate product information is important for several retail processes, related to merchandising, purchasing, shipping, record taking, planograming, FIFO & expiry control, stock tracking, customer marketing, etc.

In many instances, retailers/retailers struggle to get trusted product information which is consistent & accurate. Several instances of incomplete information or wrong depiction of products resulting in loss of consumer confidence.

Brand owners/manufacturers share data with multiple retailers, vendors, partners and distributors in their different/proprietary data masters which are tailored to their needs. In the process of presenting information multiple times in multiple buyer formats, a lot of data discrepancy occurs resulting in the passing of inaccurate and inconsistent product information.

In 2014, when GS1 India presented the idea of building a GTIN management module to Indian retail industry, the industry members collaborated with GS1 India to give this system a more robust shape. A decision was reached for building a common platform to exchange product information between brand owners and retailers/e-tailers.

This is because, at that time, even the major players in the industry were struggling to share the information of their products in an accurate and seamless manner. Moreover, it was realised that the core of delivering a seamless and consistent consumer experience is — ‘Ready access to detailed information on retailed products’ which is accurate, complete, reliable and enables shoppers to make purchase decisions with ease.

Industry joined hands with GS1 India for development of this application. In 2014, GS1 India laid the foundation to set up a collaborative platform that would enable suppliers and retailers to share product master data seamlessly.

A concept was launched in 2014 through a roadshow in the country. Prototype demonstrations were held with retailers and brand owners to gauge their ideas and the process of thinking about the system and how it will benefit the master data sharing processes.

There were business members from about 40–50 businesses, including brand owners, retailers and online marketplaces who came together to sit down and work on setting up such a service portal.

A pilot project ‘DataKart’ was introduced in mid-2015 for roughly 6–8 months, where industry members used the service extensively and came up with further changes that were required in the application, to improve its usability. Once those changes were made, DataKart service was formally launched by GS1 India in 2016.

Since then, various brand owners, retail/e-tail companies are using DataKart to receive product information from their suppliers and source new products/suppliers.

DataKart currently hosts information on over 10 million retail products across all categories with rich attribute information related to product images, label information, etc.

Exchanging product information through DataKart has enabled retailers / etailers to reduce/remove the dependency on information residing as silos in various excel sheets across its departments. Also, retailers have realised faster updates in their item masters, and reduced the number of wrong Purchase orders, resulting in higher fill rates.

On the other hand, brand owners don’t have to share their information again and again in multiple formats. With DataKart, they upload the information on their products once and share it with multiple buyers in one click, in their respective native formats. Similarly, quality product data changes are automatically notified to retailers/e-tailers once updated in DataKart.

Real-time updates are received through DataKart helps retailers/e-tailers keep their item masters relevant and updated at all times.

Subscribe to DataKart to upload accurate and complete product information to the native file formats and enhance quality & consistency of product data management.

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