How Toll Roads Cost You on the Digital Shelf
What's a toll road?
Why are toll roads used?
What do toll roads cost?
Let's stop toll roads
Let's move past toll roads
What's a toll road?
Get the full report
When third-party technology vendors have exclusive content onboarding relationships with retailers, they charge brands a per SKU fee to create, enhance, and send product information to a specific digital endpoint. In some cases, a brand may pay a third-party vendor $100,000 or more to simply deliver digital product information to appears on a single retailer’s website.
Ultimately, toll roads hinder your investment to create the most impactful shopper experiences on the digital shelf. Brands are forced to pay for the exact same services: generating images and basic content, and sending that content to retailers.
Not all retailer fees are toll roads
Fees from retailers that directly help with improving sales of more products by driving visibility, demand, value, and increasing customer loyalty, including promotion trade spend, new packaging and retailer analytics.
Data pools like GDSN operate differently than toll roads. GDSN provides a standard set of baseline product data across an entire product category. Retailers or channel partners pull the data from the GDSN-validated data pool into their own product information management solution to enrich for specific endpoints. While it costs brands a license fee to use the data pools, they are not restricted on which suppliers to work with.
TLDR: Charging brands a toll to simply send product content to a retailer hinders digital shelf growth.
What's a
toll road?
Get the full report
How Toll Roads Cost You on the Digital Shelf
When third-party technology vendors have exclusive content onboarding relationships with retailers, they charge brands a per SKU fee to create, enhance, and send product information to a specific digital endpoint. In some cases, a brand may pay a third-party vendor $100,000 or more to simply deliver digital product information to appears on a single retailer’s website.
Ultimately, toll roads hinder your investment to create the most impactful shopper experiences on the digital shelf. Brands are forced to pay for the exact same services: generating images and basic content, and sending that content to retailers.
Not all retailer fees are toll roads
Fees from retailers that directly help with improving sales of more products by driving visibility, demand, value, and increasing customer loyalty, including promotion trade spend, new packaging and retailer analytics.
Data pools like GDSN operate differently than toll roads. GDSN provides a standard set of baseline product data across an entire product category. Retailers or channel partners pull the data from the GDSN-validated data pool into their own product information management solution to enrich for specific endpoints. While it costs brands a license fee to use the data pools, they are not restricted on which suppliers to work with.
What's a
toll road?
TLDR: Charging brands a toll to simply send product content to a retailer hinders digital shelf growth.
Get the full report
Why are toll roads used?
TLDR: Charging brands a toll to simply send product content to a retailer hinders digital shelf growth.
How Toll Roads Cost You on the Digital Shelf
In traditional brick-and-mortar retail, brands
allocate trade spend - often the second largest item on their P&L - to offer temporary price reductions, rebate programs, and other promotions as well as gain preferential shelf display locations (slotting) and circulars.
After dramatic retailer consolidation (Kroger/Meyer and Albertsons/ American Stores mergers) and the fragmentation of mass media audience, suppliers were tasked with growing sales for an entire category, not just their brand. Circulars were a reliable place for retailers to get the attention of shoppers in a specific location.
To put a product in a circular, a retailer needed, minimally, an image of the product, the product title, the price, and other basic information.
Similarly, to put a product into a shelf planning system, a retailer needed all of that plus the full set of GS1-compliant planogram images.
FMCG brands turned to technology vendors to develop connections and save having to develop their own, in-house planograms, allowing them to get to market faster.
However, each retailer picked a different third party. The result being that each FMCG manufacturer was ultimately forced to work with all of the vendors -
that is, paying for the same service over and over and over.
Today toll roads cost brands needlessly
So in the year 2010 if you were, say, Kellogg, you’d have to pay for the same service for the same SKU multiple times: ItemMaster to produce planograms for Walmart, Brandbank
Why are toll roads used?
TLDR: Toll roads saved brands from having to develop their own planograms and get to market faster.
Get the full report
Why are toll roads used?
Get the full report
In traditional brick-and-mortar retail, brands
allocate trade spend - often the second largest item on their P&L - to offer temporary price reductions, rebate programs, and other promotions as well as gain preferential shelf display locations (slotting) and circulars.
After dramatic retailer consolidation (Kroger/Meyer and Albertsons/ American Stores mergers) and the fragmentation of mass media audience, suppliers were tasked with growing sales for an entire category, not just their brand. Circulars were a reliable place for retailers to get the attention of shoppers in a specific location.
To put a product in a circular, a retailer needed, minimally, an image of the product, the product title, the price, and other basic information.
Similarly, to put a product into a shelf planning system, a retailer needed all of that plus the full set of GS1-compliant planogram images.
FMCG brands turned to technology vendors to develop connections and save having to develop their own, in-house planograms, allowing them to get to market faster.
However, each retailer picked a different third party. The result being that each FMCG manufacturer was ultimately forced to work with all of the vendors -
that is, paying for the same service over and over and over.
Today toll roads cost brands needlessly
So in the year 2010 if you were, say, Kellogg, you’d have to pay for the same service for the same SKU multiple times: ItemMaster to
