Claire had been saving up for months for a weekend of trekking with her family. She had planned everything in advance, booked her family into one of the best resorts in the area, bought the best trekking equipment including bags, ropes, hiking shoes/boots, trekking poles and climbing gear, and even enrolled her kids in fun activities at the resort. What she didn’t plan on was that her dream holiday would be ruined by bad product data. You see, prior to her trip, Claire had purchased trekking rope from her favorite and most trusted e-Commerce site. And, she could swear that the product page said the rope was made of ‘kernmantle’ nylon – the type of rope recommended by her guide. But during the trek, she found, to her dismay, that the rope was made of a much-inferior ‘nylon-blend’ that left her with rope burns despite wearing gloves. As the family left the resort that weekend, Claire was certain about two things – one, it was going to be a long time before she tried trekking again, and two, she would never shop at her favorite e-Commerce store again, ever.
Claire is not alone in her predicament. Every day, thousands of customers log their frustrations into overworked servers of e-Commerce stores hoping they get a solution to their situation; a situation that could easily be prevented with a good product information management system in place.
Bad Product Data is Real
When you mention ‘bad product data’, people tend to imagine a shady site without proper security features, or payment authentication process, and inevitably bad data. But that is not the case. Bad product data is real and it happens to everyone. In fact, bad data is so real, it happens to some of the leading marketplaces and big e-Commerce retailers.
And, the trouble with bad data is that it costs you, real bad. And, that’s not just in terms of lost revenue or sales, it costs you your customers – customers like Claire, who’ve been loyal and supportive of you throughout your journey! And, it costs you your reputation.
Good Product Data and the Customer Journey
Good product data, on the other hand, is often crucial, yet ignored, aspect of e-Commerce selling. It is a like a roadmap guiding customers to find what they are looking for. Good product data, rich and accurate, make the customer journey simple and helps them make well-informed buying decisions, faster.
Good product data helps your customers evaluate your products against their expectations, influences buying behavior, and helps you increase your conversion rates.
The relationship between good product data and the customer journey is simple and beautiful. Let’s say a customer comes to your site looking for a certain product; good product data establish a line of communication with your customer, answering his/her questions about the product, giving an insight into the product, providing a better perspective and romanticizing the whole customer journey itself (with product descriptions).
The Need for Good Product Data
Good product data is essential for the success of any e-Commerce retailer or marketplace. And, it includes accurate product data, with specifications, high-resolution images, rich product descriptions, and suggestive links to related products.
Good product data essentially helps
- Pave the way for happier customers and better-informed customer journeys
- Build better customer relations
- Improve your image among your customers
- Increase your customer base
- Increase customer satisfaction levels
- Improve loyalty among customers
- Build your brand
- Give you the competitive advantage
- Increase revenue and sales
The Scale Factor
Strangely enough, customer experience has nothing to do with your marketing efforts, rather it has more to do with your ability, as a marketplace, to provide answers to your customer’s questions. When you provide product information that is accurate and up-to-date, your customers are happy and they keep coming back to you more often. But if your product data is wrong or incorrect, it ends up misleading your customers.
In order to give your customers correct, accurate and reliable product data, you need to invest considerable manpower, time, and money into the process. Good product data is not easy to come by. As the owner of a buzzing marketplace, you probably have thousands of retailers and suppliers in your client list. Managing product data at scale could turn out to be a magnanimous task if you’re planning to do it manually, and not to mention, once again, the time factor you’d be compromising on – potentially costing you your market share. It is to address this quality issue, in a time-sensitive manner, that Mobius built ProductiWise – a quality-focused product data platform to help you deliver good product data to your customers.
ProductiWise for Data Quality
Highly automated, customizable, quality-focused, and data-centric, ProductiWise simplifies product data quality management across any product landscape. We built ProductiWise with only one thing in mind – to help you manage and deliver good product information to your customers through a unified platform while cutting down costs and ‘time-to-live’ of products.
To learn more about how ProductiWise works, visit our website. And, to give your products the ‘ProductiWise Advantage’, contact us.
Sailakshmi Baskaran
Senior Content Writer
