Salsify & Trellis – The Partnership Your Business Needs in 2023

Jack D'Errico

Jack D'Errico

Picking the right technology partner in 2023 can be a challenge. With a large number of potential technology applications & partners across the landscape, it is more critical now than ever that eCommerce businesses select a good partner.

As more and more business moves from traditional brick and mortar to the eCommerce industry, especially in a post COVID world, Trellis has seen a real advantage for our clients to adopt a working relationship with Salsify.

To that end we have created a middleware for use with Adobe’s Commerce offering Magento. Our middleware takes care of communicating with the Salsify product suite with out of the box functionality baked in, so business members can focus their energy where it matters most. 

What is Salsify?

Salsify is a software-as-a-service (SaaS) product that “helps brands win on the digital shelf.” The digital shelf is a term used within Salsify to encompass a collection of diverse and evolving digital tools used by shoppers.

A common theme in todays world is an omnichannel offering. It is not uncommon for a consumer to see a product for sale in a brick and mortar store, look it up online for reviews, and then order it to be shipped to their home through Amazon fulfillment. 

Salsify allows a company to build a consumer journey for their products so they can control how that journey is navigated, potentially even influencing which products are purchased and where. 

A couple of it’s flagship offerings are the Asset Management system and the Product Information Management (PIM) system. Both of these are used within our middleware offering.

Asset Management

In the web world the number of assets any company uses has increased dramatically from where it was a decade ago. This substantial increase means that the internal teams need a centralized location to manage those assets. Salsify offers an internal system to make this management more streamlined for its adopters. 

According to Salsify’s resource documentation the system allows for an automated process which transforms  all assets including resizing, renaming, and reformatting. As well as a searchable asset database so cross-functional teams can always find the content they need quickly. An internal content tags and smartlists to maintain organization even if the number of assets is in the thousands.

Using our middleware it is possible to receive updates from the Asset Management system directly to Magento without needing to do anything extra after it is enabled.

Product Information Management (PIM)

The use of a PIM has been growing over the last decade. The purpose is to allow for the centralized management of product data across a variety of channels, such as brick and mortar as well as eCommerce simultaneously. 

Salsify’s PIM  offering combines a comprehensive set of core data services. 

This keeps Salsify customers from having to choose between data governance and speed.

With Salsify, users can: (taken from Salsify’s resources section in order to be accurate)

  • Increase Control and Agility: Data inside Salsify is quickly cataloged, The solution also supports a number of data domains and like most of the platform has a handy search function to find anything immediately.
  • Reduce Bottlenecks: Different roles within an organization need different things from their company’s PIM. Salsify was built with this in mind to offer anyone inside a business to access the content they need.
  • Design Company Specific Workflows: Every company is unique and has developed specific workflows to help it achieve business success. Salsify is accessible by nearly any team in the business, and features a drag-and-drop UI to map exact business processes, while it includes some pre-built workflows it does allow for truly bespoke offerings as well.

The PIM offering by Salsify is considered industry standard, the workflow ability is a relatively new feature in the eCommerce world. While not cutting edge, it is definitely something that will be a benefit to any user.

This is where the bulk of Salsify’s clients find it useful. With that in mind our middleware is focused on implementing this PIM system. Product updates are fed directly into Magento and we also offer the option to allow Magento to delete products from Salsify using their robust API. 

The Trellis Salsify Integration

Several years ago Trellis began writing an integration to get Magento working with Salsify. We recently took that integration open source and it can be found here

Product Sync

The primary function of our middleware is to facilitate product syncs from Salsify into Magento. As mentioned above part of the PIM offering allows for business units to manage their products in a centralized location. Magento is one of the worlds leading eCommerce platforms, so rather than worry about doing a manual import or update of those products, Salsify clients can now just rely on our middleware. 

Field Mapping

When Salsify does not name a product field something friendly to Magento we have built a robust field mapping integration to map them between the two. Most of the time when we help clients get setup with Salsify this is where we spend the lion’s share of our time. Once all the fields are mapped properly where needed this integration can be setup to run automated on the server without human intervention required. 

Custom Options

Our integration allows the addition of JSON in the Magento admin area, to map custom options to a product coming in from Salsify. This offers an infinite level of customization for clients without limiting their teams creativity. 

Product Relationships

A big part of Magento is the ability to control product relationships, our integration middleware is able to work with the native Magento product relationship functionality to take advantage of upsell and cross sell relationships. 

There are a number of other features, including setting up automatic updates, category imports, etc. These are all detailed in the Git Repository linked above with instructions on how to configure them. 

The question of if Salsify is the right solution for your business can be answered by setting up a meeting with a Salsify partner. Trellis is always happy to discuss these types of engagements.

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