Celebrating Six Million

KYKLO recently blasted beyond the 6 million SKU mark and started the new year with an impressive 6.4 million SKUs. It’s no secret a successful system requires great product content. We thought we would share details about our process by asking KYKLO Co-Founder and Chief Technology Officer, Fabien Legouic, to share some insights on creating a vast amount of content.

A great system must contain a Product Information Management system.

A Product Information Management system (PIM) is an application that provides a single place to collect, manage, and enrich your product information. The system also creates a product catalog and distributes it to the e-commerce platform. 
Further, the PIM must be well-integrated with:
1. The e-commerce search engine
2. The faceting/filtering engine (which allows users to narrow their search)
3. The configurators and product pages.  

Managing these three elements of your system separately is a recipe for high e-commerce costs and poor outcomes. With the introduction of a PIM, all three sections act as a team to deliver performance greater than the individual components.  

KYKLO’s PIM, catalog, and commerce engines were built jointly from the ground up to fit these content requirements. Extending further, the KYKLO PIM is natively integrated within KYKLO search and filtering, allowing content creation to be focused on the end-user experience. This is much different from the more common approach of asking, "How will I fit this data within the PIM constraints?”

A great e-commerce system has design objectives that match the end-user’s needs.

The KYKLO design objectives for creating and updating content follow this plan: 

1. Trust: build a great digital twin of the manufacturer's products, closely following the manufacturer's content and specifications. 

2. Findability: build content to be found by more than just its product code. It’s 2024, customers want to find technical products without remembering (or copying/pasting) codes or catalog numbers from an Excel spreadsheet. 

3. Relevance & accuracy: KYKLO custom builds all descriptions to be non-duplicative and to show distinct differences between similar products (at the description and specifications level). KYKLO also ensures that filtering attributes are meaningful for the product. For example, customers rarely care about the color of a breaker. Plus, our system is designed to be efficient for customers. We avoid the trap of clicking on six filters and still ending up with 150+ products in the results.

Here is an example of the result of all these efforts.

To give you an example of how all this works, check out a page developed for Festo. KYKLO found and deployed the highest quality product content with the best filters and configurators, and we also created an elegant methodology for them to display product videos, whitepapers, and other support materials for their distributor partners. The great news is this information can easily be pushed down to their distributors through the KYKLO API. 

Let us give you a simple seven-click self-guided tour of the website:

Click Here

This link points to the Product Configurator page.

1. Click on Cylinders and Actuators. Notice how you get a listing of the types of devices.
2. Follow any of the paths and notice how the website guides your visit.
3. Hit your browser’s return button to get back to the Product Configurator page.
4. Click Product Highlights from the top menu. 
5. Note the display of videos providing additional information on products. We like the approach in the first video Festo Work from Home Pitch. You will see a cool story about their Angle Seat Valves.
6. From the top of your screen select White Papers. The whitepaper labeled Achieving Functional Safety in Factory Automation provides useful customer information to help with the application of Festo products.
7. Support documents are available instantly by selecting Tools and Support from the top.

Thanks for joining us on our short tour. This time you don’t need to tip your tour guide. But, if you would like your customers to enjoy these great features, give us a call.