What Is Data Enrichment In eCommerce And How Can You Benefit From It?

Data enrichment can help your eCommerce website perform higher in a number of aspects. It can provide a better shopping experience for your customers and yield better revenue.

How can it help you to achieve that? Let’s get into details about the value of data-enriching practices for eCommerce, starting with a definition.

Why Data Enrichment Is Crucial In eCommerce?

Product data is essential for any eCommerce business as it allows for optimizing the entire value chain. Lack of it results in a poor experience for potential and existing customers and lower profits. How?

For example, if you don’t find enough information about a product to decide if it’s good for you, would you check out other goods on the same website? No, most likely, you’ll go searching for another web store. For each such case, shopping cart abandonment rates increase. In fact, seven out of ten customers will leave your site without a purchase.

Poor experience for customers also means they are less likely to come back. Enriching merchandise content with quality data that is applicable to the target audience, on the other hand, will help convince customers to stay and follow through with an order.

eCommerce Product Data Enrichment Tactics

Now that you know what data enrichment is and why you need it, let’s discuss what it can help you achieve in practice.

Content enrichment helps determine what kind of information is missing from your catalog, especially if you use B2B data enrichment tools. These content types can be:

• Category details. Good organization into product categories improves filtering, so it’s easier to find the desired item. For example, if your shop offers tech items, it’s good to have a distinction between smartphones and printers.
• Certification information. Customers may be looking for specific types of wares within a category, like a waterproof phone, and certification can help with the eCommerce search enrichment.
• Size details. This kind of information is especially critical for fashion items because it’s not just about the dimensions of a product, but how a piece of clothing or shoes will fit.

You can also enrich eCommerce product data by using tags (e.g., blue jeans, party dress) or other such identifiers to ease the search for suitable items. This helps with:

• Improving product discovery. The faster and easier it is to find an item, the more likely a customer is to buy from you and use your services in the future. For example, if someone is searching for the latest Lenovo smartphone and you have a “new” category, they’re more likely to find your shop in search results.
• Minimizing returns. High-quality and relevant information about goods also means a customer is more likely to be satisfied with the purchase. For example, if you give precise dimensions for sofas, it’s more likely that a customer will choose the one that fits the space.
• Improving customer experience. Sufficient details and good categorization improve product search and thus, customer experience and loyalty are enhanced as well. Like in cases when people don’t know an exact product name but searching by certain details can lead to the right item.

At this point, you may be wondering what exactly is sufficient and high-quality content. Let’s get into details about that.

Five Great Tips For Product Data Enrichment

Product data enrichment is all about quality over quantity. Simply adding more information doesn’t ensure that it’s relevant to your target audience. So, the following are a few tips on prioritizing data enrichment.

The 80/20 Rule

You can apply the Pareto principle in a lot of cases. And in this one, it means that applying 20% effort into enriching your product data — analyzing your resources, using eCommerce software — can result in 80% more profit. Better customer experience gauges better sales.

Work On Your Main Products

You most likely offer products that produce higher competition – the ones that customers are more likely to google, like a popular hair dryer or the newest smartphone. Focus on enriching content for those goods so it’s easier to make a purchase decision while on your site.

Fill The Gaps Where Content Is Lacking

Let’s say you stock one of the latest Samsung models. What would your customers be most interested in? It’s probably:

• The size of the new modes – how big it’s going to be compared to their previous phone.
• Display and resolution – how well it reflects the color.
• Cameras – if it takes high-resolution photos and selfies.

Enriching data involves filling in the gaps with information that’s applicable to your customer profiles.

Studying Demographics Data

Information like age, occupation, purchasing power, and marital status can help you understand the shopping tendencies of your clientele. Consequently, this gives you a better idea of what information may be relevant.

For example, demographics show what life events your audience experiences, which can be helpful with categorization. Tagging something “suitable as a Christmas gift” means you can chalk up a gift guide in no time when that time of the year comes.

Studying Location Data

Mobility details can help you better understand your audience’s lifestyle preferences. For example, if you sell fashion wear and some of your customers move around the city a lot, it’s likely they will be interested in the comfort level of the items you sell.

Benefits Of Investing In Product Data Enrichment

Product data enrichment is an investment, particularly if the time that employees are involved in the process will be spent on research and actual improvement activities. But this investment comes with a few handfuls of benefits:

• Improving SEO and rankings. Product tags, rich descriptions, alt tags, and other attributes improve the search and consequently help search engines rank your pages. Especially, if you focus on customers’ search intent when defining these attributes.
• Becoming compliant with global standards. If your products have a certificate of authenticity or are part of the EPREL database that ensures high manufacturing standards, or have a GTIN (Global Trade Item Number) that improves global search – you can show such compliance on the product pages.
• Improving conversion through product recommendations. Customers shop for specific items or by category, but in either case, a rich recommendations list can facilitate a more satisfactory purchase. For example, a toy is likely to need batteries, so it’s good to recommend items from the “Batteries” category along with products that have a “Batteries required” tag.
• Facilitating gap analysis. Using data enrichment services can help identify your store’s current state and how well it meets expectations, and then rectify the worth-performing patterns.

Aside from these benefits, data enrichment also positively affects your revenue, thanks to the following aspects:

• Influence on return rates. About a third of returns happen due to what customers consider the store’s fault and it’s unlikely that these people will shop with you again. However, proper attribution and rich product descriptions can lower the rate of people buying the wrong thing.
• Reducing brand interference. A lot of product returns happen when customers realize that the item they got is a replica, not a genuine branded product. Proper attribution will help reduce or eliminate such cases so they don’t affect return rates and customer loyalty.
• Facilitating intelligent product recommendations. It’s difficult to recommend if there’s no metadata to go by. On the other hand, attributes and tags connect each product to one that can be recommended to a customer or that is usually bought together.
• Facilitating cross-selling and up-selling. Like in the case with recommendations, tags and attributes make the connections to similar items, popular products from the same category, or the ones that are often bought together to enhance value (like a razor with replacement blades).
• Improving product discovery. Content enrichment means that your product pages offer correct information, but also genuine and relevant search results. This means that customers discover the right items faster.

How Does A PIM Solution Complete Product Data Enrichment?

Now you know why data enrichment is important and what kind of practices you need to make the process worth your while. The next step is to set up the activities to improve product information and acquire the potential benefits. That’s where a PIM system comes in.

Product information management software provides features for creating, storing, distributing, and otherwise managing the information that your customers may need or want to know about the items you sell. It helps improve the accuracy and quality of content, and consequently, the shopping experience your customers get.

But most importantly, a good system like Gepard PIM will help identify information gaps where the accuracy, quality, and searchability of your products can be enriched. At the same time, it provides content enrichment services via:

• Reducing manual work. The PIM system automatically optimizes the imported data, so instead of copy-pasting ounces of information, you get standardized and enriched entries. This also reduces the errors that usually come with manual work.
• Acquiring compelling content. Third-party integrations optimize the content for the eCommerce environment within days instead of months.
• Enhancing customer shopping experience. Unique product descriptions provide customers with relevant information that improves decision-making and delivery of the utmost experience.

Data Enrichment FAQ

There are a few more questions we should cover to show how the process works.

What Type Of Data Is Used For eCommerce?

eCommerce leverages a few types of data that facilitate analytics and improvement of the business processes. They include:

• Product – any information about the items you sell created for the customers.
• Store – information about your vendors, sellers, and platforms you use.
• Sales – information about prices, stocks, and in-demand items.
• Customer – information about the shopping activity of your buyers.

How Does eCommerce Collect Data?

You can collect eCommerce information with tools, such as:

• Web analytics services – for establishing a baseline for web traffic metrics (e.g., Google Analytics, HubSpot, Mixpanel).
• CRM software – for managing customer interactions and keeping track of your sales data (e.g., Zoho CRM, Freshsales, Salesforce Sales Cloud).
• Ad tracking software – for monitoring customer interactions with your ads and thus improving future marketing campaigns (e.g., Bitly, ClickMeter, AdsBridge).

What kind of software you use will depend on the metrics you deem necessary to track.

How Do Content Enrichment Services Work?

The process is pretty simple: you import the product catalog, the system then filters and optimizes the information, and third-party content providers enrich it with accuracy and quality. Once this is done, you can distribute the catalog to your eCommerce platforms.

Transform Your eCommerce With PIM Software

Product data enrichment is an essential step in improving customer experience and your eCommerce revenue, but the process can take up quite a lot of time when done manually.

Luckily, you can reduce the time to market thanks to software like Gepard PIM. And you can do that thanks to features that automate data transformation from different formats and distribution of the complete enriched product catalogs to all your web stores and eCommerce platforms.

Gepard can help you enrich data and thus reduce time to market, increase profits, and sell faster. Want to try the platform to transform your business? Contact us to book a personalized demo.