How To Improve Ecommerce Product Data Quality Using PIM Software
In the realm of omnichannel ecommerce, where the digital marketplace thrives, the key to achieving remarkable success lies in impeccable product data quality. In an age where customers demand seamless experiences, ecommerce businesses that invest in maintaining accurate, comprehensive, and up-to-date product information are poised to dominate the competitive landscape. However, maintaining optimal data quality is no easy feat.
Businesses grapple with numerous challenges, such as managing large inventories, handling diverse product information, and adapting to ever-evolving market trends. Failing to address these challenges head-on can have severe consequences, undermining product experience and impeding conversions.
In the absence of being able to handle products physically, ecommerce consumers demand high-quality and accurate information to make the right purchase decision (Omar et al., 2021), with 30% of shoppers abandoning their shopping carts due to insufficient or inappropriate information on websites (Baymard Institute, 2022). These statistics highlight the tangible impact of poor data quality on customer experience, purchasing decisions, and overall revenue potential.
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This is precisely where Product Information Management software (PIM) emerges as a single source of truth and a game-changer by streamlining the process of collecting, organizing, and disseminating product data across different touchpoints. PIM software empowers businesses to elevate the quality and consistency of their product information.
The result? A superior customer experience that fosters trust, increases conversions, reduces time-to-market, and drives sustainable growth.
How Is Ecommerce Data Quality Measured?
When measuring ecommerce data quality, there are several key aspects to consider.
- Completeness: One important measure of data quality is the completeness of product information. This refers to ensuring that all relevant attributes and details about a product are accurately captured and available to customers. Incomplete data can lead to confusion, reduced customer trust, and missed sales opportunities.
- Accuracy: Accuracy is another vital aspect of data quality. It involves ensuring that the product information provided is precise and error-free. This includes accurate pricing, correct specifications, and up-to-date inventory availability. Inaccurate data can lead to disappointed customers, returns, and a negative brand reputation.
- Consistency: Maintaining consistency across product data is crucial. Consistency involves using standardized formats, categorization, and naming conventions to ensure coherence and ease of navigation for customers. Additionally, consistency applies to attribute values (i.e., how attribute values are provided within a product) and how attributes are provided across products. Inconsistent data can confuse customers, hinder search functionality, and impede the overall user experience.
- Relevance: Relevance is about providing the right information to the right customers at the right time. This means tailoring product data to match the specific needs and preferences of the target audience, as well as not overloading users with not needed information. Relevant data enhances customer satisfaction and engagement and ultimately drives conversions.
- Timeliness: Keeping product data up-to-date in real-time is essential. Timeliness ensures that customers have accurate information regarding product availability, pricing changes, and promotions. Outdated data can lead to frustrated customers, lost sales, and a tarnished brand image.
In the retail business, product data quality encompasses all these aspects—and more.
It includes detailed product descriptions spreadsheets, high-quality images, accurate dimensions, specifications, and variant options (e.g., size, color). Retailers must also ensure product data is optimized for search engines, allowing potential customers to find their products easily.
Additionally, retail businesses must consider the uniqueness and differentiation of their product data. In a competitive market, having compelling, distinct product descriptions and features can attract customers and set a retailer apart from its competitors.
Ultimately, product data quality in ecommerce and retail is about delivering an exceptional customer experience, building trust, and driving conversions.
Strategies For Optimizing Data Quality With PIM Software
Implementing a Product Information Management (PIM) solution can be a game-changer for businesses aiming to centralize data management and enhance automation to improve data quality and ecommerce success. Here are practical tips and strategies to master data quality using a PIM solution:
Taxonomy definition
The cornerstone of data quality is the taxonomy definition. It includes multiple aspects and requires skills and an analytical approach, and it all will pay off.
One of the primary is identifying the product content schema and attributes such as basic product info, marketing information, attributes structure, rich content, and multimedia.
The second one is product identification—electing attributes to identify products MPN/SKU/GTIN/EAN: creating classification, category tree, defining attributes and assigning these to categories, building LoV, grouping attributes to its groups for easier navigation.
Data validation
Establish validation rules: Define validation rules within your PIM software to ensure product data meets specific criteria, such as accurate pricing formats, valid SKUs, or consistent naming conventions.
Implement real-time validation: Set up real-time validation checks during data entry to catch errors and inconsistencies immediately, preventing them from propagating throughout your system.
Typically you want to connect your validation rules with your attribute definition/structure—i.e., the attribute data should match the attribute definition. The attribute definition by itself should provide sufficient ground for the validation.
Data cleansing
Conduct data audits: Regularly perform data audits to identify inaccuracies, inconsistencies, and duplicate entries. Use the cleansing capabilities of your PIM software to correct and eliminate errors systematically.
Standardize and normalize data: Apply standardized formats, units of measurement, and naming conventions to ensure consistency across your product information. Eliminate redundant or outdated attributes to streamline your data.
Data enrichment
Enhance product descriptions: Invest in rich, detailed product attributes that provide valuable information to customers, including features, benefits, and unique selling points. Use the PIM tool to enhance digital asset management (DAM) and enrich existing product datasets with multimedia assets, such as images, videos, and user-generated content.
Incorporate SEO optimization: Leverage PIM software to optimize product data management for search engines. Implement relevant keywords, meta tags, and structured data markup to improve visibility and attract organic traffic.
Connect to third parties to leverage existing databases: Crowdsourcing of data using user experience or available market information from aggregators (price aggregators, user reviews, etc.)
Data governance
Establish data ownership: Clearly define roles and responsibilities for managing product data. Assign data stewards who are accountable for data quality and governance.
Implement workflows and approval processes: Set up workflows within your PIM software to ensure that data changes go through an approval process, guaranteeing that only accurate and validated information is published through different channels.
Data integration
Integrate with other systems: Connect your cloud-based PIM software with other business systems, such as ERP or CRM, to ensure data consistency across your ecommerce platforms. Enable seamless data exchange, synchronization, and updates to avoid discrepancies.
Continuous monitoring and improvement
Monitor data quality metrics: Track key performance indicators (KPIs) related to data quality, such as completeness, accuracy, and timeliness. Regularly review these metrics and address any issues promptly. Think of dashboards connected to quality metrics.
Implement feedback loops
Encourage feedback from customers, sales teams, and other stakeholders to identify areas for data improvement and uncover potential data gaps or errors.
By implementing these strategies and leveraging the capabilities of a PIM solution, businesses can significantly enhance data quality, streamline operations, and provide customers with accurate and compelling product information.
For instance, let us review a case when Gepard PIM enabled ecommerce integration and helped the brand to transform and deliver its product data to the largest consumer electronics retailer in Nordic countries.
The purpose of the project was to establish an integration that would enable smooth product data push to retailers from brands and medium-sized distributors. Since the retailer had complex product taxonomy and specific requirements for data output and data push, Gepard PIM created a digital solution for data transformation and delivery.
The client’s product taxonomy was different from the category structure of brands and content providers. Brands and small-sized retailers face the challenge of complying with highly-specific taxonomy: global and local structures for each category.
What was the solution?
With Gepard PIM’s intelligent taxonomy mapping and product syndication, it was easy to substitute brands’ product data with relevant product descriptions (e.g., names of product categories, features, feature values, and units). It allows the sellers to transform product data structure into a specific product taxonomy.
The easy-to-navigate interface helps brands to send their product content to any retailer locale. One feature has its unique ID, which enables you to choose the language you need. When the new feature is added, you can assign a locale to it without investing time and resources into setting new mappings.
The most interesting challenges can be noted:
- The customer wished to implement the crowd-managed data enrichment leveraging its suppliers' available content.
- The customer had a complex and unique taxonomy created, which supported the data quality metrics on a high level despite data being delivered through completely independent sources.
- Validation rules were a part of the taxonomy definition, and that guided the data delivery process through a real-time validation.
And I will give one anti-example from another client:
Validation rules were manually wired in the import process. There were a huge amount of data that was delivered via batches to an existing Product Information Management system. The validation mechanism supported only a report on the entire batch, and an error in one product blocked the entire batch. As a result, not a single product could enter PIM.
The project was canceled, and the team disbanded.
5 Key Benefits Of Implementing PIM Software
A PIM solution acts as an open-source centralized platform that streamlines and optimizes the management, enrichment, and governance of product data.
It enhances data quality through key features:
1. Improve centralized data management
A PIM solution serves as a central repository for all product-related information, consolidating data from various sources and systems.
This centralized approach eliminates data silos and ensures consistent and accurate information across multiple sales channels, such as online stores, marketplaces, and catalogs.
2. Validate data with rules and checks
PIM software provides robust data validation features that enforce data integrity and quality. Through predefined rules and validation checks, businesses can ensure that product data meets specific criteria, such as correct formats, valid SKUs, and accurate pricing.
Data validation minimizes errors, enhances data accuracy, and reduces customer dissatisfaction due to incorrect or inconsistent information.
3. Enrich product data
One of the key advantages of a PIM solution is its ability to enrich product data. Businesses can leverage PIM software to enhance product descriptions, add multimedia assets (images, videos, documents), and incorporate additional attributes that provide comprehensive and compelling information to customers.
By enriching product data, businesses can deliver richer and more engaging experiences, resulting in increased customer satisfaction and improved conversion rates.
4. Enable standardization and consistency
PIM systems enable businesses to establish standardized formats, units of measurement, and naming conventions for product data. Through consistent data standards, businesses can ensure that product information is presented uniformly across all channels.
Standardization eliminates confusion, enhances the user experience, and instills customer confidence, leading to improved brand reputation. PIM enables businesses to implement standardized product taxonomies and synonyms, enhancing search relevance even further.
When customers search for a particular term or keyword, the system can match it with related products accurately, increasing the chances of converting searches into successful purchases. Product data should be consistent across multilingual sources, too—ensuring global compliance in real-time.
5. Build robust data governance practices
PIM solutions facilitate robust data governance practices. They enable businesses to establish standardized processes for data collection, enrichment, and validation, ensuring data accuracy and compliance with industry regulations.
PIM systems allow businesses to organize product information in a structured and hierarchical manner. This hierarchy ensures that product relationships, attributes, and categories are well-defined, making it easier for customers to navigate and explore the catalog seamlessly.
Future PIM Trends And Recommendations
Data quality management is an ever-evolving discipline, and businesses must stay ahead of emerging trends to maintain a competitive edge.
I would like to highlight insights into the latest trends in content management and recommendations on leveraging innovative Product Information Management (PIM) capabilities.
AI and machine learning for data quality
Emerging technologies like Artificial Intelligence (AI) and Machine Learning (ML) are revolutionizing data quality management. Businesses can leverage AI-powered algorithms to automate data validation, identify patterns of errors or inconsistencies, and suggest data enrichment opportunities. ML algorithms can learn from data patterns and provide proactive suggestions for data cleansing and standardization, ultimately improving data quality and efficiency.
I recommend exploring PIM solutions integrating AI and ML capabilities to automate data quality processes and enhance decision-making. Leverage intelligent algorithms to detect anomalies, predict data quality issues, and streamline data management workflows.
Advanced data governance
As data privacy regulations tighten and customers become more privacy-conscious, advanced data modeling practices are crucial. Businesses must establish robust data governance frameworks that ensure compliance, security, and ethical data handling. This includes defining roles and responsibilities, implementing data access controls, and maintaining audit trails of data changes.
I see the potential in leveraging PIM software with advanced data governance features, such as role-based access controls, data versioning, and data lineage tracking. Implement privacy principles to build customer trust, satisfy business needs and comply with data protection regulations.
Integration with data quality tools
PIM systems are increasingly integrating with third-party data quality tools and services. These tools provide specialized functionalities for data profiling, cleansing, and enrichment.
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Focus On Data Quality Now To Future-Proof Your Business
Data and analytics have increasingly become the main drivers of business success, and the potential for effective data management business strategies is greater than ever.
There is a further acceleration of digital transformation and data-driven business, according to Gartners’ 10 Strategic Data and Analytics Predictions Through 2028.
Therefore, it is clear that we need to prioritize data quality to stay competitive and thrive in the ecommerce landscape.
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- Unleash The Power Of PIM Data: 6 CEO-Endorsed Tactics For Ecommerce
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