Omni-channel commerce is a term used in marketing and sales to describe businesses that leverage multiple channels to market and sell their products. The aim of omni-channel commerce is to increase your brand's visibility, generate more inbound leads, and reach more buyers. For example, when an ecommerce retailer lists their products on multiple sales channels, including Amazon, eBay, Etsy, they're running an omni-channel strategy. In data commerce, when a data provider lists products on many data marketplace, they're also running an omni-channel campaign.
Channel integrations are set up between the commerce platform (e.g. Shopify) and the marketing or sales channel (e.g. Etsy). The integration means that the vendor enjoys a no-code listing process: by working with their one commerce platform account, they can publish on any integrated channel.
In the context of Data Commerce Cloud (DCC), channel integrations refer to DCC’s integrations with data discovery platforms including Databricks Marketplace, Google Cloud Analytics Hub, Google Dataset Search, and SAP Datasphere Marketplace. Channel integrations are the core of DCC’s value proposition for data providers: they make it easy to build an omni-channel data business. DCC’s channel integrations enable businesses to publish their data products in data marketplaces and exchanges with just a click, no engineering resources required.
DCC offers various channel integrations, including the most popular and established data marketplaces in the industry. Current integrations include SAP Datasphere Marketplace, Alation Marketplaces, Google Cloud Analytics Hub, Datarade Marketplace, Google Dataset Search, and Databricks (coming soon) and more are being added all the time.
SAP is the world’s largest provider of enterprise application software. The company aims to bring together the solutions, technology and best practices needed to run integrated, end-to-end business processes in the cloud. SAP Datasphere is one of the company’s cloud-based solutions. Its Data Marketplace is hosted in the Datasphere and is a driving force for data democratization, facilitating self-service data exchange within and between enterprises.
Alation Marketplaces is a meta-marketplace ran by Alation, the global leaders in data intelligence. The company is trusted by over 450 enterprise clients for its data governance, democratization and collaboration software solutions. Alation Marketplaces was launched in early 2023 to supplement Alation's flagship product, the Alation Data Catalog. Whereas the Data Catalog only offers internal datasets already being used by Alation's customers, Marketplaces lists external datasets sourced from AWS, Snowflake, and data.gov.
Analytics Hub is a cloud data warehouse and data exchange platform that allows users to efficiently and securely exchange data assets across organizations thanks to a robust security and privacy framework, built on a decade of data sharing in BigQuery. BigQuery has supported data sharing within an organization's security perimeter since 2010, as well as data sharing across boundaries to external organizations such as vendor or partner ecosystems. In September 2022, over 6,000 organizations shared more than 275 petabytes of data in BigQuery, excluding intra-organizational sharing. Analytics Hub simplifies the administration of sharing assets across any boundary, while still providing access to BigQuery's key capabilities, such as its built-in ML, real-time, and geospatial analytics.
An easy way to start selling data online is by leverage data commerce platforms. They’re a new category of SaaS product designed to make selling data as easy as selling any other good or service. With a data commerce platform like DCC, you can start selling data online by getting listed on major data sales channels including Google Cloud Analytics Hub, SAP Datasphere Marketplace, Alation Marketplaces, and Datarade Marketplace.
Selling data on data marketplaces usually involves three key steps. The first is registering your company. For this, the marketplace operator will run KYC checks on your business to check you’re a legitimate business looking to monetize its data.
Once you’re registered and published on the data marketplace, the second step is creating data products. Data products are essential to market and sell your data offering. Without product listings, there’s nothing for marketplace buyers to purchase! Having a well-stocked storefront will improve your sales success.
The final step in selling data on data marketplaces is the transaction and fulfilment upon closing a sale successfully. Some data marketplaces will enable you to receive payment over the platform; others require you to log the contract details as a transaction. This way, you can keep track of how much you’re selling on the data marketplace.
One of the fastest ways to monetize your data fast is by building an omni-channel business. With an omni-channel data business, you maximize your reach by having your brand present in all the major data marketplaces. This way, your products are visible to more prospects, you receive more leads, and you increase the velocity of your sales. As a result, monetizing your data is faster and more scalable.
