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Muby Tech | What is VPI? A Comprehensive Guide to Its Origins, Evolution, and Importance in Retail

What is VPI? A Comprehensive Guide to Its Origins, Evolution, and Importance in Retail

By David    November 18, 2024
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What is VPI? A Comprehensive Guide to Its Origins, Evolution, and Importance in Retail
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In this rapidly evolving world of retail and e-commerce, accurate and high-quality product information is important. Vendor-provided imagery (VPI) is essential to ensure that product information reaches the right customers. VPI refers to the collection of product-related media and data vendors provide to retailers. This includes high-quality images, product descriptions, specifications, pricing, and other product-relevant details to display the best possible rendering of vendors’ products. Vendor-provided imagery (VPI) will be at the center of ensuring that the right information for a product reaches the right customer.

 

This article will explore VPI’s origins and how it has evolved within the modern retail landscape. We will examine its importance in successfully streamlining operations, maintaining brand consistency, and supporting retail vendor collaboration.

Origins of VPI

VPI was initiated to solve the problems retailers faced in handling product information across their organization, especially when they dealt with numerous vendors. Before VPI in retail, retailers first depended on sources within the organization when gathering information on products. For thousands of items, it was a task to find the right description, the latest price, and the best image.

Even though these practices were implemented, they introduced several problems, such as incomplete product descriptions, outmoded prices, and poor quality or lack of pictures of the products. Such issues made frustrated and skeptical consumers surf websites, and ultimately, sales were derailed, damaging the trust between the company and the customers.

VPI transferred the responsibility of gathering product information. In VPI, the vendor was now responsible for collecting detailed, accurate, and timely information—including spec sheets, prices, pictures, and other essential media. This new approach greatly improved the accuracy of product listings across all retail channels.

Vendors could always supply rich-quality data directly from the source. In this way, retailers were not required to update every product in their catalog; they depended on vendors to provide accurate and continuously updated information.

VPI helped streamline product data management processes, avoid costly errors, and increase alignment between retailers and vendors to ensure it operated more efficiently and would better please customers across platforms.

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The Evolution of VPI in Retail and E-commerce

As digital transformation spread rapidly through the retail and e-commerce platforms, the role of VPI distinctly changed. In the initial phases, when the extent of e-commerce was minimal, information on products was quite enough. With time, as customers started to open up more with their needs, there was a greater extension of e-commerce. Customers no longer needed simple descriptions and single images but instead high-quality pictures, videos, and product specifications.

 

With the enhanced sophistication of e-commerce platforms, the demand for VPI increased. Retailers needed more complex and richer data to improve website and marketplace listings and ensure the data was integrated into inventory systems and supply chain processes. However, today, along with regular pictures, retailers have to serve 360-degree views, lifestyle images where product usage is shown in real life, and even customer feedback.

 

The advance of omnichannel retailing, which permits shoppers to shop on websites, through mobile applications, and in-store, made it crucial for VPI to ensure the homogenization of product data on all channels. This has modified the VPI systems to ensure product information integrates smoothly across all customer touchpoints. This change in VPI has been the impetus behind many retailers’ digital transformations, allowing customers a smooth, integrated shopping experience irrespective of their channel choice.

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VPI Key Data Points and Their Importance

VPI incorporates several fundamental elements, essential in ensuring data kept in the whole retail chain is accurate, consistent, and high quality. These are some of the core data elements incorporated in VPI:

1. Product Description

Product descriptions must be obvious, simple, and proper to inform customers about a product’s features and benefits. Poor descriptions often lead to confusion, dissatisfaction, and abandoned carts. VPI ensures that every piece of information about products is complete and updated.

2. Specifications

Detailed specifications of products, including their size, weight, material, and any technical attributes, allow for a contrast between identical products and help make decisions. Without accurate and complete specifications, retailers will lose sales due to missing or incorrect details.

3. Images and Media

High-quality images from several angles of the product shots, lifestyle images, and videos can help reassure people to buy. VPI will enable vendors to have high-resolution images, so there is no pressure on retailers to handle such information themselves.

4. Pricing Data

Accurate pricing data are required for both the vendor and the retailer to maintain a competitive advantage and to avoid inconsistencies. VPI is critical to ensuring current market pricing.

5. Compliance Data

With VPI, compliance data regarding safety certifications and regulatory compliance are far more comprehensive. It assists retailers in adhering to legal standards and prevents product recalls or consumer protection issues.

The Role of VPI in Today’s Retail Environment

In the context of today’s retail, VPI assists in optimizing operations, improves brand consistency, and enhances collaboration between vendors and retailers. Some of the ways this contributes to modern retail practice are as follows:

1. Streamline Operation

VPI enables vendors to provide standardized product information, thereby minimizing the time and effort retailers spend on processing and updating product details. By taking data directly from the vendors, retailers reduce their manual entries, thereby increasing efficiency.

2. Improving Customer Experience

Quality product information helps customers make better purchasing decisions. VPI ensures that the consumers receive an accurate presentation of the products considered for purchase, reducing the possibility of returns and increasing customer satisfaction.

3. Ensuring brand integrity

Brands rely heavily on VPI to enable the product to be sold accurately and uniformly across different delivery channels. By doing so, brands can control product imagery, descriptions, and specifications, protect their brand image, and uphold quality and integrity.

4. Enabling Better Vendor-Retailer Collaboration

It allows for better collaboration between vendors and retailers. Key enablers of VPI are better communication between vendors and retailers, aligned product offerings with the vendors’ retail strategies, and easier, updated real-time information exchanges between vendors and retailers over inventory, prices, and promotional details.

5. Data accuracy and consistency

Accurate and consistent product data would ensure a smooth customer experience. Since VPI ensures that all data is consistent across physical stores, websites, and mobile apps, the product information that customers receive through all these channels is consistent.

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Conclusion

Vendor-provided imagery (VPI) is so much more than an image or the description of a product. It is one of the valuable tools that the modern retailer must obtain to benefit from better collaboration, data accuracy, and a maximized customer experience.

Understanding the origins of VPI,  its e-commerce product information role, and its importance of VPI, retailers and vendors can now grab hold of it and optimize their operations while building toward improved brand integrity and winning on the forever-shifting battlefield of electronic commerce. As retail and e-commerce continue to evolve, VPI will play an increasingly vital role in shaping the future of product information management like never before.

By MubyTech
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