Product data feeds can either drive your eCommerce campaign to success or failure. According to one report, one in four consumers has abandoned a purchase because of poor product information.
Some eCommerce channels even arrive at conclusions on making your product visible for a search query based on your data in your feed.
For having a quality product feed, you should ensure it's not inconsistent or inaccurate. Such data conveys false product information to customers that'll lead to an increase in the returns, impact brand loyalty, and a gradual decline in the revenue for the brand.
A survey stated that 83% reported poor data quality impacts their business initiatives, and 56% of organizations admitted losing sales opportunities to poor data quality. And with more and more brands entering the eCommerce arena, none can afford to lose customers due to wrong product data.
What Is Product Information?
Product Information is an integral part of any shopping experience in the eCommerce age. It also enables businesses to present customers with the right product every time. But what is product information? Well, it's information about a product, though not as simple as it sounds. However, there are criteria to meet to be helpful in brick-and-mortar and online space in the current era.
Product information is either Offers and Catalog data. Offers refer to all the data concerning the sale of a product, including the stores it sold, the price at each store, promotions, availability, shipping details, etc. On the other hand, a Catalog deals with more descriptive information, like attributes, features, images, unique identifiers, etc. If Offers data is more dynamic, Catalog is static. Catalog data can also include images, videos, descriptions, etc. And anyone in the business of dealing with product information, be it a customer, retailer, social shopping app, or any other channel data, will remain of utmost importance.
Why are accurate product data feeds important?
If you want your customers to trust your brand, accuracy in the product information is vital, especially when buying online. If they find their attributes are missing from the product descriptions, brands will not retain customers, and their products will remain on the shelf.
Keeping the eCommerce aspect in focus, product information that's detailed, comprehensive, and precise will allow customers to access and understand the product's attributes and benefits, making them more likely to purchase. In addition, by having this information at hand, brands can increase brand visibility, consumer retention and generate a steady flow of revenue.
What's included in a product data feed?
1. Product Title: A vital part of the product data feed is the Title. Along with promoting visibility, it'll also motivate customers to click the listing or ad.
2. Product image: Customers will not just click on a blank page. To make your product enticing, provide the customers with high-quality product Images. It may not be a critical factor in helping with the visibility, but it'll impact clicks and conversions.
3. Product category: As mentioned before, listing products in the correct category leads to a better browsing experience. Not only will it make the customer find what they are looking for, sooner but it increases the likelihood of a sale. In addition, when retailers create and categorize their product feed with the correct information, it's easier for the Google algorithms to map it against user queries.
4. Product type: Product Type is the way you describe the product. You also have the freedom to add several keywords to this attribute. For example, if you are selling sweatshirts in the winter, you can add the product types "sweatshirts" and "winter." It will also help the channel to understand your product.
5. Product Description: Although description influences clicks and conversions, it isn't crawled for keywords. It roughly translates to no immediate influence on discoverability or visibility on channels. But this doesn't mean you should have a bad or poor description because it will lead to poor performance.
6. GTIN: GTINs are unique product identifiers. A company uses it to identify all of its trade items uniquely. If the product is not unique, it will require a GTIN in the product feed.
7. Product stock information: Local stock information is necessary when doing localized ads for a store, such as Google's local inventory ads or Facebook's local targeting. So, if you would like to drive consumers to your brick and mortar stores through PPC, keep your local stock up-to-date so that customers are aware of which stores to visit.
How to improve the product data quality?
1. Collect and prepare your existing product data:
After you have opted to go with a PIM (Product Information Management) solution, you first must gather data concerning your existing product. Then modify or prepare it in a way that it's used effectively in other channels. Usually, market research, suppliers, and ERP can provide such data. What PIM does, in this case, is determine which sources have the best attribute data. Plus, once the data is in the PIM, you get access to a range of tools that'll help you expand into new channels and places and thereby accelerate the time-to-market.
2. Organize your products and attributes to scale data enrichment:
When there are a lot of products to manage, it's essential to devise ways to ensure product information processes scale. PIM can do this by making the process less complicated and making it easier for the marketing team to find and enrich the product information.
3. Classify your products in popular categories:
Not only do you gain an understanding of the best attribute data with PIM, but you also get to structure your Catalog in categories that customers search. To have a better understanding of your product categories best to get in touch with your eCommerce managers, who have an insight into how your customers are searching for products. For example, as a watch seller, you can simplify the search for your customers. For example, dividing the watch styles based on gender (men or women) by features likes strap material or color. By directing your products into specific categories that customers generally browse for, you improve the browsing experience and increase the possibility of a sale.
4. Write product descriptions that are impactful:
To have quality product information in place, you need to tap your team's marketing skills to write compelling and impactful product descriptions that also match your company's voice. Even in B2B scenarios, an emotional connection has proven valuable for buyers. And when you have a PIM solution, your team can carry out this work by automating the manual work. PIM also ensures that your company's voice is consistent and appropriate for every channel.
Furthermore, you must remember to include elements in your product description that accurately represent your products. Write more than just specs; try to tell a story with words, images, or both. Also, ensure that the description is SEO friendly and the language that customers recognize, rather than using technical terms and rich vocabulary. For optimal SEO, also see that every product that goes live has metadata.
5. Create associations among products:
PIM enables you to create a set of seasonal items before the season of sales kicks in. You can associate several products you want to promote together during this time. Plus, you can use cross-sell associations to sell items related to one another, for instance, a computer and a printer, a camera and a bag, or a t-shirt and jeans.
Product Data Scraping
Considering the type of product you're planning to launch in the market, the competitor number will vary. And when it comes to extracting product data at a large scale, a manual method is not an ideal option. It'll also lead to errors that don't occur when the process is automated.
By employing the web scraping technique, data extraction occurs quickly and efficiently. Crawlers or robots are put at work to automatically crawl specific pages on a website and extract the necessary data. Further, the extracted data is made available in a readable format, usually in a CSV format.
From competitors' pricing details to customer reviews, a web scraping tool can obtain all relevant information in a matter of a few hours.
But not every website makes it easy to scrape product data, and for this reason, Datahut uses:
Rotating, residential IP addresses,
Using real user-agents
Sending requests at different intervals from various IP addresses
Pre-detecting and avoiding traps
Using Captcha solving services to bypass captchas
Keeping up to date with website changes
Extracting data from eCommerce sites is overwhelming, however not impossible when you have Datahut services at hand. With us by your side, you can quickly obtain product data from eCommerce sites as per your needs.
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