A data quality impacts not only your sales but also the fact if your products can be easily find by the customers. In other words, the product data quality plays a major role in the decision-making process of customers. The customer who types a keyword in the searching engine and gets too many or too little results often being perhaps completely incorrect or misleading, with no possibility to filter the output records, will most likely abandon your pages and turn into your competitor rather than proceeding in putting products to your e-shop shopping cart.
High vs. poor data quality
The data quality isn´t created only by pretty formulations and by an effort to list all important features. Let’s take an example. A customer had bought a bathtub in your e-shop and along that a related product, in this case, bathtub clawfoots. You deliver him the items but the customer finds out at home that the clawfoots don’t match the bathtub. Apparently, they were labelled incorrectly on your e-shop and in fact, they are designed for a different type of bathtub, not for the one he had just bought. This will probably not only make the customer’s day very unpleasant because he will need to deal with the eventual complaint, but it will also send a signal of you as being unprofessional.
Another significant problem of many e-shops is that data is missing completely. The customer will be affected by this especially when buying clothes for example. We all know our measurements and sizes well. But how should we know which size to buy for that particular T-Shirt? The size 36 or 38, S or M? To solve this eternal dilemma, the customer usually chooses a telephone help or sends a message to the salesman (or directly to a helpdesk operator in many cases). This engagement of additional channels seems unnecessary nowadays and moreover, it requires a presence of your employee on the end side to be able to answer the customers’ queries. You waste the time of your resources and it makes you inefficient.
Equally important is the correct product classification. If the customer enters a search for some car lights for Škoda Octavia on the e-shop and those display in category with bumpers, it could make him so impatient that he rather leaves the e-shop with disgust.
The data quality also affects the offline channels. Individual channels have to share the corresponding parts of the information that should logically link to each other (e.g. price stability). The customer has to be at the focus of interest. The whole point is not to produce lots of information via different channels and to hope with fingers crossed that the customer will select the relevant ones himself still patient enough not to run away during his purchase into competitor’s welcoming arms.