February 13, 2015 Industry news
The move towards omnichannel retailing places the web at the heart of the consumer’s retail experience. This presents brand owners and retailers with a number of challenges, especially as the consumer now expects a seamless experience across channels.
The consumer journey has changed; online research is now critical and occurs at any stage. Consumers want more relevant and complete search results they can trust, found quickly and easily.
GS1 has been working with our members, standards organisations and search engines - like W3C and Google - in a key initiative to make it easier to discover and describe products on the Web. As a result, we now have a new draft standard (GTIN+ on the web) ready for public review and we invite you to give your opinion.
Bringing GS1 standards into the web will greatly enhance online product search and improve efficiency in product information management.
All in all this offers brand owners and retailers:
- Improved accuracy
- Completeness of online search
- Higher traffic
- Fewer missed items
- Higher conversion rates
Which will ultimately lead to selling more product.
To find out more information on 'The benefits of using structured data' in your business see our whitepaper.
Take part now
Your feedback will be used as input to revise these first drafts. We’ve created a public GS1 web page where you’ll find a high level summary, an introductory PowerPoint and the two documents in this review:
For marketing, commercial and IT teams we ask that you read the implementation guide which includes the business motivations for deploying the standard to improve search and product information in websites.
Whilst we would ask developers to also read the GS1 web vocabulary and test the RDF (Resource Description Framework) Turtle files, which are also available.
What you should know - The new standard makes use of and extends three existing concepts:
- The Global Trade Identification Number (GTIN): this is the number already encoded within the barcode on nearly every product worldwide
- A HTTP URI that represents a product’s identity on the web (that can be encoded on to a physical product as a QR code or similar)
- The publication of structured linked data that Brands and Retailers can use to express information about their products and offers
For most developers the new standard supplements their knowledge around linked and structured data. The benefits of the standard to manufacturers, retailers and consumers are discussed in the implementation guide.
This initiative seeks to support the rapidly evolving world of omnichannel retailing and the review period will run until 27 Feb 2015.