Furniture and homeware retailer, tectake, has scaled its marketplace activation, selling across 80 marketplaces in 16 countries, simultaneously reducing product launch times while still meeting each marketplaces’ unique product information requirements, in partnership with Akeneo, the Product Experience (PX) company and leading provider of Product Information Management (PIM) solutions.
Founded in 2005, tectake sells a wide range of affordable furniture, home accessories, pet supplies, and outdoor equipment across Europe, including the UK, Germany, Denmark, the Netherlands, Italy, France, Spain, and Switzerland. The full range of approximately 2,000 functional, budget-friendly products are sold direct-to-consumer (DTC) through its digital flagship stores.
Marketplace sales were estimated to account for more than a third (36%) of online purchases in value across Europe in 2023*. Accordingly, tectake has a robust marketplace strategy, selling curated product assortments on leading sites including Amazon, Cdiscount, Fnac-Darty, Otto and bol.com.
With each marketplace having its own unique requirements for product data, including attributes, formats and character limits, maintaining data accuracy and consistency across all of its marketplaces was a significant challenge, explains Liz Vianna Vaz, Head of Marketplaces at tectake:
“The scale of our marketplace activation creates a huge amount of data that needs to be managed effectively. Our team is constantly adding new attributes as requirements change and adapting our data and content for each marketplace to ensure the best quality of information to make our products easily discoverable while providing customers with all the information needed to have the confidence to buy our products. Manually managing data for 2000 products was extremely time-consuming and errors were unfortunately inevitable.”
Tectake adopted Akeneo’s Product Information Management system into its technology stack in (2019), allowing it to create a single source of product data – centralising updates and ensuring consistency at each point of purchase while preventing data silos within the teams. In 2023, tectake extended its partnership to include Akeneo Activation to enable its to activate product experiences at scale across its marketplace channels.
By leveraging the PIM as the central repository for product data, tectake can now distribute product information across channels through direct connections to each marketplace. Akeneo Activation allows for automated mapping of product data to specific marketplaces, including identifying the correct category on each channel for specific product families and ensuring product attributes are correctly mapped to each marketplace’s requirements. The solution automatically alerts the team as channel requirements change, allowing tectake to respond in a timely manner to make sure all product listings are active and optimised.
Looking ahead, tectake is focused on integrating and managing additional marketplace platforms into Akeneo Activation.
Justin Thomas, VP Sales, EMEA North at Akeneo, commented: “Marketplaces are a crucial sales channel for retailers and brands looking to expand their reach and customer base. However, the constantly changing requirements can create a heavy workload to ensure product data needs are met and goods remain discoverable. By utilising Activation, tectake has optimised its multichannel strategy, ensuring they can respond swiftly to market demands and deliver compelling experiences to customers globally.”
