As we enter the 2016 Holiday shopping season, many retailers are rushing to add thousands of products to their online catalogs. In a race to ensure that these products are added in time for the upcoming shopping surge, many retailers are not taking the time to validate the product information of their newly added items. This results in product listings that contain inaccurate product identifiers, incorrect product specifications and duplicate content. This problem is so widespread amongst retailers that a Ventana Research study found that over 80% of retailers are not confident in their product data, and 75% of retailers said they “had difficulties agreeing on standardization for their data, let alone fixing the actual data itself”. If retailers are not diligent and validate every bit of product information they add to their online stores, errors and inaccuracies will cause a bad shopping experience, and will cost them sales and revenue during the holiday shopping season and beyond.
Below are the top errors caused by a lack of data validation:
Error #1: Listing The Wrong Products or Duplicate Listings
Ever searched for a product online and saw two items that looked similar, had to compare between the models to try and find the differences, only to discover they are the same item? When retailers receive lists of products from suppliers & distributors, most include product identifiers such as Brand & MPN (manufacturer part number), UPC/GTIN, along with product names. It takes a lot of manual labor to verify all of the information on these product lists. Due to this, product names often do not match the product identifiers, causing retailers to create a product page for an item that does not exist in their inventory, or create multiple pages for the same product.
The problem of duplicate product listings, which occurs when the same product is uploaded using different identifiers, is especially important for sellers on marketplaces. Several sellers may list the same product under different Brand & MPNs, or UPC codes, causing confusion for the customer. Additionally, products are frequently updated with newer models or special bundled offers often available specifically in time for the holiday shopping season. There have been many cases where shoppers received the wrong products. In fact, 23% of returns occur because shoppers received the wrong items. Retailers that do not validate the data of each product will see an increase in returns as shoppers may purchase the wrong products. In addition, multiple product pages for the same product will cause “decision fatigue” amongst shoppers who try to make a purchase. Marketplace merchants can also face a removal of their listing by the marketplaces.
Error #2: Listing inaccurate product attributes
Suppliers and distributors often fail to provide retailers with accurate (or any) product attributes. More commonly, retailers fail to validate the product attributes they receive in data feeds from suppliers & distributors, or lack the resources or data management processes to perform the validation. Using inaccurate product attributes in product listings will mislead shoppers to purchase the wrong items, or lead them to go to a competing store to find or verify the information they need to make a purchase decision. Additionally, including the wrong attributes can prevent a product from showing up in search results on web stores, marketplaces, and search engines. Shoppers that do manage to find the product and purchase it will be disappointed to find that the product is “not as advertised” and will lose trust in the retailer. Taking the time to verify that all product attributes and specifications are accurate, and correcting errors and/or completing any missing information will help ensure that shoppers are able to learn all they need about the products they are looking for, and increase sales.
Error #3: Duplicate content
As retailers find themselves rushing to add many new products to their online catalogs for the holiday shopping season, many skip out on creating unique content such as product titles, features, and descriptions for every product they add to their online store due to the manual labor involved in creating the content. Retailers often fall back on unreliable or incomplete product information provided by suppliers & distributors, or copy content directly from their competitors. This causes thousands of retailers to have the exact same product information, which is also often incorrect. For example, a recent search for a Sony a75 Mirrorless Digital Camera produced 2,160 identical results on Google.
Search engines are designed to recognize and ignore such duplicate content, leaving the retailer with a product page that does not display in search engine results. Additionally, this opens retailers to become targets for copyright lawsuits.
The holiday shopping season is a critical and often stressful time for many retailers. Taking the time to “do things right” and ensure that all products offered are fully validated and have complete, unique product information will enable retailers to truly maximize their opportunities this holiday season, and allow them to be confident in their catalog when the dust of the holiday shopping season settles.
Sigmento searches thousands of sources for product content, eliminates inaccurate and duplicate content and provides unique product content for client retailers.
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