Fashion marketplace accelerator The Agent has leveraged Akeneo’s Supplier Data Manager (SDM) solution to streamline and enhance the onboarding of its suppliers’ product information. The partnership has helped reduced return rates, while doubling the number of products onboarded and significantly accelerating speed-to-market.

Online fashion accelerator, The Agent, works with leading apparel brands, including Le Coq Sportif, Herschel Supply Co and Aigle, to optimise and scale their presence on marketplaces, such as Zalando, Amazon and Decathlon. Offering either a fully-managed service model encompassing the end-to-end selling process or tailored services to maximise sales, The Agent receives product information from hundreds of brands each season.

The product data, which spans thousands of SKUs, is often across multiple languages and formats, making processing, cleaning and enriching product information a time-consuming task. Previously, product data was managed manually across disparate spreadsheets and emails, meaning it was not only prone to inaccuracies but also slow to serve due to the time-intensive manual review processes needed to launch products.

Using Akeneo’s SDM, The Agent has unified and streamlined how product information is collected, cleaned enriched and distributed.

“Our brands now complete a guided workflow of four steps uploading and enriching product data, before our team takes over to complete the process,” Aude Guillome, Client Success Manager at The Agent, explained. “This allows faster integration, improved accuracy and, ultimately, better customer experiences.”

The partnership has significantly improved the accuracy and completeness of product data. The Agent can now enrich content to include detailed attributes, such as style, fit and colour, and images, as well as making products more filter-friendly on marketplaces. This improves visibility and discoverability, which is becoming ever more crucial – especially where marketplaces, like Zalando, are increasingly using AI assistants to identify and recommend products based on attributes.

“As online marketplaces become more demanding, high-quality product data is now a critical asset in ensuring sales success, Guillome continued.

Since deploying Akeneo’s SDM, The Agent has reduced return rates by -10%, doubled the number of products onboarded and accelerating time-to-market by a third.

“Delivering high-quality, compliant product data in a timely manner is critical to ensuring commercial success on [marketplace] channels,” Romaine Fouache, CEO at Akeneo, commented. “By using SDM, The Agent ensures that its brand partners are marketplace-ready with the content necessary to reduce returns and boost visibility.”