All about
Talkoot is the Product Information Management (PIM) built specifically for Direct To Consumer (DTC) brands. They have a specific goal of turning your product information - your images, your descriptions, etc. - into a story that your consumers will relate to and buy from.
They have an AI copywriting engine that can help you draft a great story for each of your products, and optimize those stories by channel, and eventually even by visitor (I’m talking personalization here, which is super cool!). The AI engine gets trained based on your brand voice and can be tuned and tweaked to things like changes in brand, seasonality, etc.
And they have the ability to flag, collaborate, comment, and update the status on all of your products so that other teammates can see the status, make notes, and basically just get stuff done, and fast.
They have an automated brand check that operates like a sort of spell check, but not just for words, but for phrases that you don’t want to use for your brand, such as “improves performance,” “anti-microbial,” and other terminologies that may get you in trouble with certain channel partners or legal.
In their platform, you can create jobs for your teams, select the content needed for the job (and you can even build templates, such as the “Amazon” template for the job, assign the job to a team member, and follow their progress to completion.
What’s a Rich Text element?
The rich text element allows you to create and format headings, paragraphs, blockquotes, images, and video all in one place instead of having to add and format them individually. Just double-click and easily create content.
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Static and dynamic content editing
A rich text element can be used with static or dynamic content. For static content, just drop it into any page and begin editing. For dynamic content, add a rich text field to any collection and then connect a rich text element to that field in the settings panel. Voila!
How to customize formatting for each rich text
Headings, paragraphs, blockquotes, figures, images, and figure captions can all be styled after a class is added to the rich text element using the "When inside of" nested selector system.
While other PIMs are looking to be “the single source of truth,” Talkoot freely admits that there isn’t one single source. There are multiple stories that are being told around your product, and you need to have collateral to support each of them. This is a very unique take on what has traditionally been more of an “information storage” type product.
Because they are focused on collaboration, their tool in some ways has functionalities of a project management system, like a Monday or Asana, but specific to the tasks and jobs that need to be done by the merchandising and product departments. Typically you can actually phase out your project management tool for this part of the process (you keep it for other business oriented tasks, but don’t need it now for product listings, yay!).
Talkoot gives you two big wins:
- Operational Efficiency - getting your team to work faster and collaborate more on product catalogs.
- Conversion Rate Optimization - because your listings are updated faster and the descriptions are being empowered by AI, you’re going to start to naturally improve the conversion of your copy.
Talkoot is for that head of eCommerce, head of product, or head of operations who is neck deep in spreadsheets, constantly updating product descriptions, maintaining listings, adjusting listings, uploading images, getting size and style guides.
Talkoot is typically for established merchants doing at least $1mm, with at least 100 SKUs, but often more than 500 SKUs, or a constantly changing SKU set, or constantly changing copy for their SKUs (like you have to change the copy for each holiday or season).
Talkoot is not for starting stores, even if you have a high SKU count. Starting stores should likely stick with the spreadsheets until revenue grows and you can be certain that a PIM will help the business grow.
Typically you might invest in a PIM around the time you have one person fully dedicated to keeping the product listings up to date. If updating SKUs is only 1/5th of your ongoing job, you probably don’t need a full-fledged PIM. But if you’re hiring a person to take this job off your plate, you may want to empower that employee with a PIM, to optimize their time.
Of course if you have a low SKU count, or perhaps your product descriptions don’t change very often, you don’t need Talkoot.