The Importance of a Product Data Management System in E-Commerce

An e-commerce business may generate a considerable quantity of data relating to measurements, inventory, and descriptions, and it is often a challenge to keep the data up-to-date and accurate.

So, there is a need to make the data easily accessible and uniform, and this is where Product Data Management (PDM) comes into the picture. Through good Product Data Management, you can make sure your e-commerce data is regulated and organized. A comprehensive Product Data Management system also makes sure that your data is well-structured, user-friendly as well as available to your customers when they visit your e-commerce website.

A good PDM system will help your e-commerce brand collect product information from a variety of sources, including suppliers, to provide your consumers with accurate product data. PDM systems play an important role in aggregating product information, tagging processes, and distributing product information across a variety of distribution channels. Most OEMs have BOM data in enterprise resource planning (ERP) systems, product lifecycle management (PLM) systems and computer-aided design (CAD) databases.

Features of the Product Data Management software:

  • Product Data Import
  • Product Data Mapping
  • Product Data Quality Reporting

What is Product Data Management?

Product data management is the process of managing and curating data for each product in an e-commerce store. This includes including product images, descriptions, reviews, tags and more.

How does Product Data Management work?

  • It is a repository of central knowledge for the products.
  • It processes the history as well as promotes data exchange and integration between companies and all users that interact with the product, for example- project managers, engineers, sales employees, purchasers and quality assurance teams.
  • Central databases manage metadata such as owner files, share status, components, etc.
  • Centralized software systems provide other systems in the company with the necessary information about the product.
  • It is used in the engineering environment to manage product-related data throughout the product lifecycle.
  • It controls product-related data and associated workflows and processes within a company.
  • It uses software to manage, store and process information about a particular product in a single central system.
  • It is a tool that designers use to create initial specifications and prototypes for new products.

Improve your E-commerce data quality substantially with these plethora of benefits that PDM offers:

  • PDM manages and tracks all the product data related changes.
  • It controls processes, helping minimize the streamline design data and cycle times.
  • It improves productivity by reusing the product design data and making timely decisions.
  • It enhances stakeholder and global team collaboration that are in association with the products.
  • The visual review is much easier with it and all product data related changes are instantly managed and tracked, simplifying audit trail.
  • It takes care of all business requirements as it allows the classification and extraction of accurate as well as precise data.
  • It assesses all the product launch and creation associated costs.
  • It helps optimize business profitability by reducing the incurred production costs.
  • It controls the entire vigilance, reducing the probability of errors, thus improving the quality of the opted measures.
  • It achieves the desired levels of security associated with projects and access privileges through its approach of role management.
  • It helps protect sensitive information.

We know that achieving the desired kind of success through your E-commerce business can be challenging. Let your E-commerce product data manager do all the heavy lifting for you, and make sure your data is still the most accurate, good quality and free of errors. What could be better than this? Whether it is the assignment of unique identifiers, entry of product data, product descriptions, taxonomy development, or the processing of the catalogs, every one of your products come with their own sets of management and organization for the most improved user experience. Your Product Data Management system can take care of all these tasks easily and help you catapult your business with your in-house resources freed up.

Product data management is therefore essential when it comes to improving the data quality and ease of product processes of your E-commerce business. Rich and good quality product content is central to a connected customer experience that leads to better customer engagement and increased sales. Choose Altius to implement it for you. Here’s more information about our E-commerce Product Data Management services. Connect to us here to get it done now.

Contact us to get the best product data management solutions

8 Ways a PIM will save your time

As the eCommerce store begins to grow, most of them face the same problem of managing and handling large scale product data. If all the product information is scattered, then the efficiency of your team will be low, errors will become common and the customer will begin to lose trust in your product. That’s why more and more online stores are implementing PIM – a management tool designed to avoid all these issues.

What is PIM ? PIM stands for “product information management”, a management tool that centralizes all of company’s product information. All the data from your product catalog is stored. There are many fields that you can add to PIM like :

  • Basic information about each product.(name, brand, price etc.,)
  • Technical information.
  • Information on sales channel and market places like (Amazon, Flipkart)
  • Stock availability.
  • Reviews for each product.
  • Product catalog, datasheet etc.,

PIM not only stores the information about your products, but does much more than that. Suppose if you have modified any product, PIM allows you to modify that product with new features on all sales channel at a time. In this way PIM can store and alter data as needed to carry out the daily tasks. So PIM acts as a middle ground. It makes importing and exporting product data incredibly easy.

8 Ways a PIM will save your time :

1. Reduces the use of spreadsheets :

Suppose if you have thousands of product descriptions to keep up to date, uploading the same on a spreadsheet would be time-consuming and also has chances of leading to human error of entering wrong data. PIM helps this type of task to be done more accurately. With PIM, users will save time by entering a large amount of data in lesser time and more correctly. This will help the right department to retrieve the correct data easily.

2. Automation :

Automation is another benefit of PIM technology. Instead of uploading data manually, companies can automatically get the correct information from different sources. As a result, you will be able to create a richer product experience, a better user experience and a high rate of return on investment. When you want to launch a new product or create offers for your product, PIM makes it easy by its automation capabilities. The automation feature of PIM takes less time to complete the herculean task.

3. Helps to optimize marketing :

As PIM centralizes all the information on your products, it provides you with information about the sales volume and other marketing statistics. It helps you to know

* which different sales channels are giving you better results.

* which keywords are working optimumly.

*life value of each product.

This information helps your marketing team to take the right marketing decisions on time. Timely taken the right decisions will increase your sales.

4. To reach milestones :

Through PIM you can track your business progress to reach your milestone in business. You can keep an eye on the product (sales), team performance and productivity. If you find certain things are lacking and creating hurdles in achieving your milestone, you can find those faulty points and rectify on time. PIM helps in time management to do such rectification. Things rectified on time will optimize your progress.

5. Unit growth :

PIM software facilitates businesses to easily assess the efficiency of various teams and units. If one unit is efficient, its data can be shared with a less efficient unit, to speed up the growth. As all the data is centralized by PIM, with less time you can enhance the growth of a less efficient team/unit.

6. Reduced errors :

As PIM store accurate information, it reduces the chance of sharing incorrect information. The reduction of errors means companies spend less on time and cost. Delivery of products, purchasing procedure and information of inventories are all optimized using the data in PIM. As a result, the customer can enjoy complete satisfaction after procuring your product. As PIM solutions are easy to integrate, companies save time and money on management and marketing.   

7. Enhances your customer experience :

As PIM maintains the whole data centrally, it is the single source of product information for each product across all the channels of marketing. When you notice any data errors, PIM will help you to improve them by eliminating the inconsistency. This will help in enhancing customer experience by quickly correcting the issues and then immediately pushing the changes to all channels.

8. To expand your business :

With PIM you can automatically publish new or updated product content to all selling channels quickly and accurately. As PIM is connected with eCommerce platforms, it allows you to easily localize product details for websites. By having PIM, you can save your business expansion cost and it is time-efficient.

Conclusion :

Finally, PIM makes it simple by providing everything in one area. It is easy to search, access, update, find and share product-related information. It makes it easier not only for employees but for teams, management, consumers and the company at large. PIM facilitates, not only manage a large amount of data but also makes it easy to work with. It’s time to conquer data and use it as a stepping stone for the future growth of your e-commerce business.

ECommerce Product Data Enrichment converts search to sales

Product data enrichment is about providing vital information of your product accurately. Customers visit your website but within no time they leave the site, as the data available of your product doesn’t keep them engage. The information of your product may not be relevant and satisfactory as per customers need. This is here, the product data enrichment plays its role and helps the online owners to convert visitors into customers.

If a visitor is not satisfied with your product data information, he will be inclined towards your competitors product-where he will get all information about what is he looking for and buy from them.

What is Product Data Enrichment ?

Product data enrichment is all about finding gaps and inconsistencies in product data and rectify them with up-to-date, accurate and relevant information. Product enrichment helps in providing more details of your product like, color, size, descriptions, measurements attributes etc.,

Most eCommerce owners tend to lose customers even before the checkout, as the customer find the product description- inadequate or inappropriate. Customers making online purchases are solely dependent on product data that store owners publish on product pages. Online merchants operating on leading eCommerce platforms including Magento, Zen-cart, X-cart etc., and market places such as Amazon, eBay etc., have successfully reduced the bounce rate on their online stores with the help of product data enrichment service.

How do eCommerce Product Data Enrichment increases sales

#1. Reduce cart abandonment :

shopping cart abandonment is one of the biggest problems online business owners are facing. Cart abandonment refers to that customer behavior, where in a customer browse a website and after satisfaction, adds these products to his shopping cart – but he will never purchase it. 2 out of 3 customers leave the website before using credit card. This usually happens when customers are not satisfied with the product information provided by the website. Wavering thought process makes customer to abandon cart at the last moment. Adding valuable and appropriate product details also enrich their product with required content ensures that customers don’t abandon carts due to wavering thoughts.

#2. Contextual information :

in simple words contextual information means, extra information that helps you understand something better.

Consumer product companies, mostly provide inadequate product information, which doesn’t have the power to compel the customers for repeat visits. The contextual product description will help the customer to understand that by purchasing your product, it will add value to their lives. They can enjoy a higher standard of life. This makes it necessary to write the product copy in a manner where it provides all the contextual product information required. Contextual marketers deliver the most relevant information possible to consumers in the timely manner possible. Contextual information helps you gain greater intimacy with customers and target market segments more efficiently.  

#3. Product page meta data to boost traffic :

There are a lot of things that go into optimizing a website for search engine optimization. One of these is metadata. The primary job of metadata is to tell not only the visitors but also the search engines what a page is about. Customers face difficulties in finding what they want to buy. It is due to inefficient product title description and mega tags. In such cases product metadata needs to be fixed immediately. Title tags and meta descriptions are essential as

  • It is the consumers first digital touchpoint
  • Gets you more clicks.
  • It helps with better rankings.

With better ranking rate and more clicks will ultimately boost the traffic to your website, thus accelerating sales.

#4. Product categorization :

it is clear that if information is not clear, properly categorized, website visitors will rarely continue to try and find the products they want. You cannot avoid product categorization. It is the ground level work. Product categorization helps the user to complete the buying cycle, before leaving the site. If product categorization is not carried out properly, it will result in lost sales. Managing product data is all about validating and fixing errors in product categorization. Developing product taxonomies, fix product descriptions with appropriate keywords and tags and classifying it correctly will help you boost your e-commerce sales.

#5. Cross-selling and up-selling premium products :

up selling is the practice of encouraging customers to purchase a comparable higher-end product than one asked in query. While cross-selling invites customers to buy related or complementary items. Both up selling and cross selling if done properly, provides maximum value to customer and increases revenue without any extra cost. Product data enrichment ensures that, purchaser visiting your website end up finding related or alternative products along with the ones they were looking for and also in the absence of it. This can be fulfilled by exhibiting all related products on a particular page.

#6. Helps in making purchase decision :

Product data enrichment facilitates faster product discovery, accurate search results and rich experience. It ensures the customers visiting your site have no doubts in mind when it comes to making a decision to purchase. Product enrichment helps customer to find right product faster with proper product description and making the buying process smooth and simple – will leave customer with no confusion and end up the cycle by buying the product and with a good customer experience.

#7. Enhances consumer experience :

With answer to all queries that customers have in mind- data enrichment  facilitates online retailers to enhance consumer experience. When customers purchase products that add value to their lives make a big difference to your overall sales number.

Conclusion :

Product data enrichment aims at enriching your product related data with relevant information. It analyzes your data thoroughly, inconsistencies, errors and duplicate entries and enrich product descriptions with keywords to improve the search rankings of your products. Implementing product data enrichment helps you increase your e-commerce sales figures and converts product search to product sales.

How does a Product Attribute Scheme Design work as a competitive advantage?

Steve Jobs very well quoted “design is the fundamental soul of a man-made creation”.

Product attributes refer to physical features, quality and design of a product that helps to attract customers to make a purchase. Physical nature, uses and benefits of the product, makes it unique and different from other competitive products in the market. Attributes include size, color, price, flavor etc., product attribute differs from product to product. For example, attributes which affects food product selection are taste, price, nutritional value and flavor. On the other hand durable products like shoes are influenced by cost, brand, color, usage, quality and durability.

Product attribute scheme design helps in describing your products, based on an understanding of your users. Designers study consumer behaviour – how the customers are making decisions about purchasing products. This will help them to design the product as per consumer taste. If the consumer gets what they are searching then they will end the purchasing cycle by purchasing the product.

Need for Product Attribute Scheme Design :

  A poor product attribute design has a very bad impact on your e-commerce business. Customers find difficulty in searching for your product due to poor product attribute this will lead to low sales and low conversion rate. For example, if visitors are coming to your landing page and leave the site before purchasing your product, it may be because they do not see the specified details that would help them choose the product they want. If customers cannot find what they need, they will move on to your competitor’s site. Such type of customer behaviour reveals which attribute needs to be given priority in the scheme design. Correct attribute design requires expert advice on user experience, PIM and taxonomy.

Competitiveness :

Products that are similar, usually are the products that are competing with one another. For example shampoo bottle. The goal of product attribute is to impress consumer enough that they pick your product over the rest. In order to stay competitive, a company needs to take it one step further and actually convince the customer to purchase their shampoo over the other shampoos. This is where companies need product attribute scheme designs by making the product look attractive, add some creative slogans and highlight the quality which other products can’t offer. To seal the deal – companies might offer competitive price, making their product simply irresistible.

Changes :

Changing product labels, and offering great price doesn’t always attract customer to buy your product. We live in a dynamic world, everything keeps on changing, so are the demands of the consumers. One year consumer may like shampoo that enhances the 9shiny texture of their hair, next year they may like a product that adds volume and increases the length of their hair. A successful product design, make changes quickly to adapt to the new customers demand. To be a competitive product attribute scheme design, need to keep up with the growing trends. To reap the benefits of the competitive market, your product attribute scheme should be more creative, add new varieties to your products, of course, competitive price is a must.

Advantages of Product Attribute Scheme Design:

  • Product attribute scheme design works as a competitive advantage as it helps you to know the changes in the consumer demand and accordingly to make changes.
  • Secondly attribute scheme helps in designing the product that matches with consumer expectations.
  • A good attribute scheme design, differentiate the company’s product with other products giving the company a competitive edge.
  • Product attribute scheme design helps in improving profit margins by increasing sales and also increases your market share.
  • A well product attribute scheme helps in easy manufacturing and distributing the products.

Conclusion : 

Product attribute helps you to identify gaps in the market, areas for improvement in product development and methods to better serve your target market to boost your sales. Consistency in attribute scheme across the entire product range will improve the customer experience leading to increased conversions and sales. Excellent product attribute scheme design is a gateway to business success. A well-designed product attribute will help you in exploring your organization’s capabilities.

Tips for prioritizing Product Content Enrichment

People are adopting online shopping like never before and the global eCommerce market size is expected to grow very high in the coming years. Current technology trends and accessibility have made it possible for every business to create an eCommerce platform in no time and start selling. As the demand for online shopping is increasing, it is necessary to see that your eCommerce site is functioning well enough.

Sometimes you may find that the content on your product page is inconsistent, lacks certain important information or deficiency in description. The product content is not optimizing your search engine ranking. Comparatively, with other websites, you may find that your website is lacking visual content, multiple product images etc. This is the time that you have to improve the quality of your online product content. If you are dealing with hundreds of SKUs (stock keeping units), the resources at your disposal may not be sufficient to enrich product data for every single product you a stock or sell.

Here are the ways to prioritize your product data enrichment for a better search engine ranking and enhancing your customers experience –

#1. 80/20 rule :

It is also known as “Pareto’s principle”. This rule is applicable in many fields like sports, health care, business etc. Applying it to the business world, the 80/20 rule suggests that 80% of your company sales come from 20% of your customers. In the sales and marketing sector, you can use the 80/20 rule as a guide with highly effective business solutions.

The main question, that most of the businesses are facing is – how to identify 20% of their main customers in order to make a marketing strategy, to achieve 80% of the result with minimum cost. Your online site may have hundreds or thousands of contacts on your product list. Keep a close watch on which customers made a recent purchase, who are frequent buyers, which ones were generous in their purchases. Which products are more in demand? Identify the 20% of your products that drive 80% of your eCommerce sales and make these products fully enriched.

#2. Customer focus:

It is important to know, which user behaviour will end up the cycle by purchasing your product. Many eCommerce websites are launched only for such selected customers who are generous in their purchase. In such cases, you can enrich those products content that is more applicable to those customers. By focusing on the products they purchase, you can increase the value of your eCommerce site and also enhance user experience.

#3. Enrich core product :

The essential products which define your brand and provide value to your eCommerce website, such products are best to choose and enrich the product content of those core products.

#4. New product launches :

When you are planning to launch a new product, make sure that your new product has relevant, current and high-quality content. Enrich your new product page with engaging and informative content, because in digital marketing ‘content is the king’.

#5. Seasonal products :

If your Online store is dealing with seasonal products, make sure that during that season your product page should be enriched with the rich and current content of the product. Since it’s a seasonal product, every season new feature will be added to your product. For example ceiling fans, refrigerators. These products are out every season with some newly added feature. Make sure you highlight your product page with that particular feature.

#6. Gated eCommerce :

If your website is accessible by only restricted or selected customers than those product pages should be enriched with relevant and informative content. For instance, I-phones are launched every year with some newly added version, so your content must have that current feature of your product, so that you can target the gated customers.

#7. Gap filling :

Identify weak points of your product content. Sometimes your product content has an insufficient description of your product then you have to enrich your content with relevant and current information about your product. For instance, if your product page is without images than you can add product images and can make it more engaging.

Pull up:

Prioritizing product content aims to boost more sales and increased revenue. Google analytic helps in identifying products with low online conversion rates. Once you identify the products – you can enrich the content of those products, helping you to increase conversion. Similarly, PIM also helps you in improving the quality and consistency of your product page, by enriching the content with more images, visual information and current eye-catching trends. Engaging content will attract buyers and convert them into online sales.

Which solution is best for managing your Product Data?

The growth and long term success of e-commerce business depends on effective product data management solutions. Product data management [PDM] is a structural approach to help control, access and share large quantities of crucial data, that provides significant value to your business. It is important and tedious to maintain and manage this product information.

What is data management ?

Data management is the process of collecting, storing and using data efficiently, securely and cost effectively. The main objective of PDM is to collect and connect data from different sources and use it efficiently during decision making.

Effective data management is a combination of best practices, processes procedures with the help of effective tools, to control and manage data resources effectively. Today’s data managers need a system that is versatile enough to meet all of their employees access needs with full data security.

Tools for effective data management:

#1. Users tracking and analysis tools :

Customers surveys or interviews are valuable tools in their own way. They will tell you only what your customers say and think and help you analyze what those customers actually do

      But the users tracking and analysis tool  intelligently  gives you an insight- how your user or your website visitors are actually engaging with your product and your content. Tools like pendo or amplitude can uncover important realities about what is good or inspires your users and what is not. Companies like Accenture use Amplitude and companies like Atricem use the Pendo tool.

#2. Road mapping software tool :

Road mapping tool is used for project planning, progress tracking, activity coordination and team collaboration. This software is a must on any list of product management tools. Best example for a road mapping software tool is product plan. 

 Product plan is a great tool for managers who prefer to create an overview of their project. It allows us to create road maps quickly and easily. It communicates plans for future work to the team and builds up a consistent and standardized work process. 

#3. Customers survey tools :

Through customers survey tools  you can send the survey out to your customers and easily track and analyze the results. For gathering quick answers to important user questions, these tools are extremely helpful.

Web based survey tools like survey monkey or type form, have so many types of pre-formatted questions that whether you want to offer multiple-choice questions, drop down lists or just open comment fields. These tools help you to do surveys in minutes. Even emails, online surveys are easy, convenient and inexpensive that it can be tempting but they may upset your UX if not executed properly.

#4. Recording app for customer’s interview:

When you speak on the phone with customers for some queries, it’s always a great idea to record a call. You never know when a customer will offer a valuable insight like why they are using your product. Tools like, Go To meeting or zoom makes it easy to record those conversations and references them later.

Go To meeting provides a fast, easy and reliable professional online meeting solution that enables customers to meet face to face and communicate virtually. Zoom brings teams together in a frictionless and secure video environment. This platform provides video meetings, webinars on all devices. 

#5. Team messaging tools :

With the outbreak of pandemic, a lot of people started working from home. These business messaging tools helped teams to stay in touch and stay productive even if they can’t come to the office. When your product data starts giving trouble or gets underway, you will want an easy and immediate means of communicating. There are certain tools that allow easy and centralized team communication. Slack and confluence are best examples for team messaging tools.

Slack is a channel based messaging platform. With slack, people can work together more effectively, connect all their software tools and services and find the information that they need to do their best work-all within a secure environment. Confluence is a collaboration tool that helps teams to collaborate and share knowledge, data efficiently.

#6. Flow charting tools :

Creating a customer journey map is helpful in giving your company a clear view of your customers full experience with your company. Journey maps focus specifically on UX of using your product. It shows all the main points of the visitors, from the first visit to your website till purchasing and using your product.

Flowcharting tools like Microsoft Visio and OmniGraffle help in mapping out the specific aspects of users’ experience with your product. These flow-chart tools help you to uncover insight and helps you to develop your future strategies through your product road map.

#7. Product management tools :

Product management tools help to simplify the tracking and documenting details. For example Trello is visually appealing and is known for its fun use of cards, lists and boards. Trello is easy, free and flexible to manage your projects in an organized way. Gantt chart is an open source software that allows its users to identify problem areas in the workflow. Another PM tool is Jira. It’s excellent for team collaboration. This tool helps you track and monitor the entire product creation process. Jira can be used on a server, a data center platform and in the cloud. Other popular project management tools include Microsoft project, Pivotal Tracker will help you to execute on your road map and keep your backlog organized.

#8. Presentation software tools :

Tools like PowerPoint, Google slides and keynote can all be used to create presentations. You can make your presentation more engaging by including images, creating movements. Vision decks for example can be a powerful way of communicating your product vision to your clients/customers and earning their buying decision.

Conclusion :

While there are many tools out there to handle different products management requirements, the choice of product management tool/software depends upon your specific needs. Product management users must use the right product management tools and product management software. There are many product management tools and product management software that you can try first, before moving on to paid ones.