Reliance Retail, Walmart among key retailers all set to revolutionise product data exchange between brand owners

GS1 India has recently launched a new DataKart service, a repository of retailed products, which has been developed based on Industry and consumer needs; for a single source of trusted, reliable and accurate information on products sold through retail stores and through online shopping portals.
The launch event, held in Mumbai, saw 55 key retailers, brand owners and SME suppliers taking part, over 40 of whom had participated in the DataKart pilot, over eight months ago.
The companies included Reliance Retail, Big Bazaar, Walmart India, HyperCity Retail, BigBasket, P&G, Nestle, HUL, Mondelez, ITC, MTR Foods, Colgate, J&J, Marico, Kraft Heinz, Reckitt Benckiser, and GSK. They all shared their experiences and expectations from DataKart, which is expected to revolutionise product data exchange between brand owners, retailers/e-tailers and consumers.
GS1 is an NGO facilitating collaboration among traders, in order to solve business challenges that leverage standards and to ensure safety, efficiency and visibility along the entire value chain. It is a standards organisation set up by Apex trade bodies, Chambers of Commerce, BIS, Min. of Commerce and Industry and is affiliated to GS1 Global, Brussels, which operates across 112 countries.
The major challenges for retail sector today has been better fill rates in stores, on-shelf product availability, lesser mismatches between purchase orders and supplies receipts, faster product listings, new product introductions, better visual merchandising on retail shelves among others. GS1 claims that DataKart will help addressing these challenges.
“Consumers would gain from higher product availability on shelves and access to more detailed, up-to-date and reliable information on products prior to purchase, through an easily downloadable mobile app,” GS1 said in a press release.
E-tailers could also segregate unauthorised/non-genuine sellers on their platform and limit their exposure/liability to fake products. DataKart would provide high quality product images and trusted product information, made available directly by brand owners/manufacturers.
“It would reduce current dependence of e-tailers on crowd-sourced information on products, which tends to be highly unreliable and even malicious at times,” the company said.
It would also facilitate seamless mapping of harmonised system code of any product with its EAN/UPC barcode that appears on the consumer products; enabling manufacturers and trading partners to correctly correlate products, as per GST requirements, that will be introduced on 1st April 2017.