Integration Challenges in Retail Media and How to Overcome Them

Retail media integration has become crucial for businesses to streamline processes and boost ROI.

Connecting your platform with AdTech solutions, payment systems, data management tools, and analytics software allows you to deliver targeted ads, increase conversions, and land more advertising contracts.

However, integrating these systems and tools isn’t a piece of cake. You must address technical issues in advance and answer these questions:

• Will data sync work correctly among different tools?
• What is retail media platform integration’s most pressing hurdle in terms of data exchange?
• Will the platform support future scaling?
• How do you secure tens or hundreds of touchpoints?
• What is the right way to integrate advanced tools?

We’ll explore practical solutions to the everyday challenges of retail media integration. You’ll learn how to design a flexible platform that supports integration and why custom software development is the best way to achieve that goal.

Complexity of Integrating with Existing Systems

One of the primary retail media challenges is dealing with technical complexity during integration. Multiple factors come into play:

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Here’s why:

• Compatibility issues. Several challenges may occur due to a lack of interoperability between a retail media platform and existing systems. For them to get along well, you will need to consider:
  • If the retail media platform has built-in support for your current software.
  • If an aging system has modern integration protocols.
• Inconsistent data formats. Each system may rely on data in different formats (XML, CSV, JSON). You must ensure that a retail media platform can collect, transform, and unify these disparate formats into a standardized structure. Otherwise, you will face operational frictions and slower decision-making.
• Unique Application Programming Interfaces (APIs). Modern marketing, sales, and inventory tracking systems use APIs to communicate with other platforms and applications. Each API has specific response rates, authentication protocols, and syntax rules.

You may wonder if addressing these technical challenges isn’t worth the effort. However, when they aren’t resolved, the likelihood of issues skyrockets:

The following strategies come in handy for overcoming the intricacies of integrating with existing systems:

• Conduct a system integration audit. The audit helps overview the entire ecosystem of tools within retail media operations. It explores how data flows between the systems and detects gaps and possible compatibility issues. The process helps develop a roadmap, plan resources, and minimize disruptions to ongoing operations.
• Leverage APIs and middleware. Third-party APIs and ready-made middleware platforms can connect retail media platforms to your systems. However, as they are designed for general use, they may not fully cover your organization’s unique workflows, data structures, or goals.

Custom integrations can be tailored to meet specific business needs, ensuring they deliver valuable outcomes. For instance, if your retail media platform requires adding a new reporting tool, custom APIs can be modified to accommodate this request.

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Ensuring Data Privacy and Security Compliance

Retail media platforms let different systems interact to collect and process essential data. The more systems are in use, the higher the chance of security threats. Moreover, exclusive access to customer data produces other vulnerabilities:

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What are the challenges of retail media that force businesses to adopt a robust security and compliance framework?

• Data sharing extends to an extensive ecosystem. Sensitive data must be adequately protected whenever you connect to an integration point. However, data misuse risks emerge if you rely on third-party ad platforms, analytics tools, or service providers.
• Targeting demands in-depth customer data. Personalization and targeting rely on individual-level data about customers. When retail media platforms share this information with advertisers, they may reveal excessive details or increase the risk of unauthorized access.
• Changing regulations. Due to the evolving nature of laws and guidelines (GDPR, CCPA, ePrivacy Directive), data privacy and compliance are complex curves. Serving ads across multiple geographies becomes incredibly challenging.

Among the consequences of neglecting privacy and security, we can mention what affects your bottom line the most:

To mitigate these ramifications, businesses can embrace the best practices for ensuring risk-free retail media operations:

• Invest in security measures. Retailers can guard against data breaches by integrating security-enabling technology:
  • Encrypt sensitive data and perform computations on top of encrypted information. This way, the data remains unreadable in case of a ransomware attack.
  • Conduct ongoing security audits to identify the areas requiring your attention and work with data flow optimization.
  • Implement data backups to prevent data loss following a security incident.
  • Develop a role-based access system to prevent unauthorized users from manipulating the data.
• Prioritize responsible ways of data collection. To foster customer trust and loyalty, retailers need to build transparent data collection workflows and mitigate vulnerabilities:
  • Gather, store, and update personal information with explicit consent from each customer.
  • Collect only the essential data to meet campaign goals.
  • Retain customer data only for specific purposes.
  • Communicate clear value to customers when they share individual preferences with your marketing team.
• Align with changing regulations in local and global markets. Here are the top proactive measures you can take:
  • Engage industry professionals to monitor regulatory changes and get advice on how to incorporate them.
  • Automate parts of privacy management using specialized software.
  • Review your data practices regularly.
  • Design retail media workflows around regulatory requirements.

Building a Scalable Architecture

Two key factors make the scalability of retail media platforms particularly crucial:

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Performance-wise aspects complicate retail media data integration processes:

• Real-time analytics is resource-intensive. Scalability is indispensable for dealing with structured and unstructured data generated by thousands of ad impressions, clicks, and conversions. Whenever data volumes grow, analytics dashboards must load quickly or refresh data accurately.
• Campaign management requires a scalable back-end. Advertisers expect the solution to support complex campaigns comprising dynamic targeting rules, budgets, and timelines. When simultaneous advertising requests increase, the platform’s back end must adapt its power without slowdowns or crashes.
• User experience is a top priority. A retail media platform’s front end must also respond to the demands of a growing partner network. Brands and advertisers will likely switch to competitors if they can’t adjust campaigns, configure targeting, or access reports on the fly.

Ignoring scalability demands leads to these negative scenarios:

What you can do about scalability today to mitigate risks tomorrow:

• Move critical functions to the cloud. Cloud platforms (AWS, Azure, or Google Cloud) allocate resources, expand servers, and provide extra storage according to demand. Thus, retail media platforms can handle peak loads without disruptions whenever the workload increases.
• Assign specific tasks to isolated modules. You can establish a web of separate components within the platform’s architecture. For example, standalone modules can be responsible for campaign reporting, user authentication, ad serving, etc. Each part can scale independently to handle increased load without disrupting the rest of the system.
• Balance load across the platform’s components. Software developers use this tactic to spread traffic burden across servers or backup options to prevent service interruptions or downtime. Even traffic distribution leads to retail media optimization and money savings, as there is no need to acquire extra servers when there is a high load.

Integration of AI and Analytics Tools

Integrating full-scale AI and data analytics tools into retail media operations presents several difficulties. Let’s overview them:

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Other technical challenges complicate AI and analytics system integration:

• There are no universal metrics. Due to data formats, ad types, and metrics inconsistencies, AI and analytics tools can encounter integration roadblocks. The absence of a retail media standardization framework requires developers to implement extra customizations for specific business cases.
• Omnichannel customer data is complex to sync. The more channels are used for retail media ad campaigns, the more fragmented the data landscape becomes. AI and analytics systems require accurate data to derive reliable insights. For this to happen, you must synchronize information from websites, in-store interactions, social media, etc.

Addressing these integration challenges early helps avoid the common pitfalls:

• Automate data preparation. AI and ML algorithms can streamline time-consuming data cleaning and preparation processes. They can automatically detect inconsistencies, correct errors, and harmonize structured and unstructured data for analytics.
• Centralize data collection. Retailers can integrate a Customer Data Platform (CDP) to aggregate customer data from all retail media touchpoints. AI and analytics systems will access centralized customer profiles and use this information to deliver accurate, up-to-date insights.
• Unify metrics and formats. With standardized ad formats, attribution models, and reporting metrics, AI and analytics tools will deliver accurate insights. Consistent measurement helps your platform provide precision targeting, performance tracking, and AI-powered recommendations.

How Custom Solutions Help Overcome Challenges

Resolving integration challenges can take time, as it requires identifying gaps in current workflows and introducing solutions to resolve them. You must also consider the bigger picture of how these solutions affect your business. If the retail media research indicates they interfere with current processes, slow down your retail media operations, or add other risks, your investments won’t pay off.

The good news is that you can mitigate the vulnerabilities before they arise by opting for custom platform development. As an expert in Retail Media and adjacent AdTech and MarTech domains, Geomotiv can:

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Custom retail media platforms help overcome unexpected integration obstacles because they fit your unique business requirements. Built to last, tailored solutions consider your current infrastructure, data privacy requirements, scalability demands, and innovation needs so you can:

• Automate intricate workflows;
• Improve ad performance on retail media channels;
• Make data-powered decisions;
• Build lasting relationships with partners and customers.

Conclusion

Building successful integrations for a retail media platform demands understanding and addressing the most pressing technical challenges. From connecting the dots in a fragmented ecosystem of current tools to incorporating advanced AI algorithms, you must manage technical risks before they escalate into critical problems.

The good news is that you can address these challenges with a custom retail media platform. Custom software development addresses unique pain points through time-tested solutions from day one:

• Custom APIs and middleware facilitate two-way communication between systems and tools;
• Security frameworks ensure compliance and protect sensitive data;
• Flexible architecture patterns ensure scalability and high response times;
• Data pipelines are ready for real-time data analysis and AI automation.