SKUvantage

SKUvantage was founded in 2012 by Daniel Roberts and Joshua Gavin. During their experience of launching e-commerce projects for Woolworths Australia, Woolworths UK and Tesco,[1] the founders realised that product photography and product content was a major challenge for retailers.[2] They developed SKUvantage to provide a service with associated technology for retailers to minimise the effort and cost of delivering product content for their ecommerce platforms.

In June 2012 the business secured funding from a number of investors including Breon Corcoran and The Foundry, an Australian Private Equity company.[3] SKUvantage commenced formal operation in September of that year.

Product content is the information presented by retailers and their vendors about their products to enable consumers to make an informed purchase choice. This information includes images, data, descriptions, video and other forms of digital content. Product content is different to long form product content, in that it is specific to products. Studies show that retailers are increasingly investing in both forms of product content[4] to drive conversion rate. SKUvantage is recognised within Australia[5] as providing value add services particularly in the grocery / FMCG sector for help suppliers display better product content to consumers.[6]

SKUvantage provides a number of services under the "SKU" prefix to support retailers and brands in this area. SKU stands for Stock Keeping Unit in a retail context. These services include:

• SKUvantage - A suite of content capture services including product photography, product data transcription and product description writing service
• SKUlibrary - A product content syndication platform, used to share product content between supplier and retailers
• SKUcapture - A product content portal to manage the acquisition of product content from suppliers

SKUvantage is used by many of Australia's leading retailers. It also manages content for the majority of FMCG leading FMCG brands via the SKUlibrary platform for distribution into retailers.[7] SKUvantage is involved in providing full product content, which includes product photography, nutritional information and marketing copy, for grocery products within Australia.[8]

The SKUvantage platform of SKUlibrary is built on the hybris ecommerce platform, owned by SAP.[9] A customisation of this platform has enabled SKUvantage to pioneer a flexible way of publishing product photography and other product content into consumers of content such as retailers and brand web sites.

The SKUlibrary platform, is used extensively within the grocery/ FMCG sectors in Australia to deliver product content to retailers and end consumers.[10] A partnership with the Drinks Association of Australia, has resulted in dedicated version of the platform for the drinks industry.[11]