Salsify Acquires SKUvantage

Frequently Asked Questions about Salsify’s Acquisition of SKUvantage

Salsify acquired SKUvantage and its commerce experience management products and services that help retailers, distributors, and manufacturers deliver engaging digital product content to buyers on October 20, 2021. Founded in 2012 by former online retailers, SKUvantage serves more than 200 brand manufacturers, including nearly all the global brands operating in Australia, and powers the exchange of accurate, approved product content with their clients’ retailer and wholesaler customers, across a diversity of sectors in Australia and New Zealand.

With this acquisition, Salsify expands its growing global footprint to this strategic market. The thousands of brands using Salsify will now have seamless access to Australia's biggest retailers through Australia's most trusted product content network, SKUVantage. This acquisition will serve as a basis for the company’s expansion into Australia, New Zealand, and the greater APAC region.

What does SKUvantage do?

SKUvantage is Australia’s leading product content solutions provider, headquartered just north of Sydney, Australia and led by Daniel Roberts, co-founder and CEO. SKUvantage offers a unique and highly innovative one-stop suite of technology and services, including:

• A collaborative ecosystem for brands and retailers to exchange product content: Hundreds of retailers use SKUvantage every month to access their supplier’s product content. This is easy and free to use for retailers while saving brands significant time and effort ensuring buyers get the correct product information. It can also act as a single source of truth for brands, feeding their brand sites, field sales tools and systems with product content.

• Easy-to-use supplier onboarding and item set-up: SKUvantage sources and syndicates thousands of products’ content with tools to help retailers and distributors improve product content quality and DAM capabilities to bundle product assets for merchandising strategies. Brands are notified when content is requested and the platform isolates each retailer’s product content requirements so that specific rules can be met with less manual effort.

• Scalable product content creation: SKUvantage content creation service transcribes product data from items sent from store or warehouse, writes SEO-friendly and brand-compliant product descriptions in any language, and provides a full set of rich media assets including CGI, video, and 360-spins.

What does Salsify’s acquisition of SKUVantage mean for the industry?

This news expands Salsify's leading global commerce experience management network, enabling global brands to be able to execute across more geographies in a coordinated way. SKUvantage has the largest, most mature, deepest commerce experience network in Australia, just as Alkemics, another recent Salsify acquisition, expanded Salsify’s footprint across Europe.

This furthers Salsify’s commitment to an open-world network where brands and retailers can connect to their consumers without the barriers presented by rent-charging, legacy intermediaries.

What do you mean by "both companies have been committed to “an open world network"? What are legacy intermediaries and how does this help break them down?

For decades, many vendors have erected paywalls that force a supplier to submit product data through them to retailers. These legacy intermediaries effectively collect a toll for moving data across the internet, and do not support fast-changing, experiential or channel-optimized content.

An Open World network is needed. Ecommerce experiences require a mixture of global branding and local, in-market execution. Salsify and SKUvantage deliver value by enabling brands and retailers to collaborate and deliver high quality, optimized commerce experiences to the consumer. They do this by removing friction across the supply chain, speeding time to market, and enabling cross-functional and now cross-supply chain collaboration at scale to customers. Enabling brands and retailers to tightly partner to deliver great commerce experiences in every market around the world is Salsify's mission.

Are there new services or technology changes available to Salsify customers?

Salsify and SKUvantage already have more than 50 shared global brand customers, with several syndicating content between CommerceXM and SKUvantage. Any content from global or Australian suppliers in SKUvantage’s platform can also be imported into Salsify.

In addition, SKUvantage excels in the creation of photography, imagery, and digital enhanced content for many of its global and local customers. SKUvantage’s ability to create this work at scale is a powerful addition of capabilities available to Salsify’s existing customer base.

What were the terms of the deal? Were changes made to staff or any office locations?

This transaction is a private transaction and the terms will not be disclosed. No changes were made to the staff of either company as a result of this deal. Salsify is actively hiring and now has offices in Boston, Lisbon, Paris, and Sydney.