How Bad Product Information Damages Your Brand

Bad product information influences around 53 percent of consumers to shop elsewhere. Product content matters, and according to 94 percent of consumers, good product information is critical when shopping online. In a recent e-Commerce study conducted by Inriver, we can see that between 2021 and 2022 there has been a 11 percent growth in consumers who consider product information as a decisive factor in their purchasing decisions. That said, this percentage is expected to grow even more during 2023.

47% consider inaccurate product information frustrating

As mentioned above, inaccurate product information strongly impacts consumer’s decisions and perceptions, causing almost half (47 percent) of them the feeling of frustration. Therefore, sharing accurate and updated product information plays a critical role in achieving higher conversions.

What does bad data look like?

Bad product data comes in many forms and it can either be caused by the quality and the accuracy of you data, or simply just by the data transferring process. Many times it can be an unintentional mistake that caused a disruption somewhere along the transfer and implementation process.

If you’re still asking yourself what does bad data look like and how can you avoid it, lookout for the following:

• Inaccurate data: unproperly entered content & not updated content
• Incomplete data: missing information such as an empty field in the product information/description
• Poor data entry: any mistake realized during the data transfer process, such as wrong naming, spelling, and format
• Inappropriate data: Information that has been incorrectly assigned to a field
• Non-conforming data: information that is not in accordance with the defined specifications for the attribute type, such as the use of symbols or characters that are not allowed for that attribute
• Duplicate data: a product or Stock Keeping Unit (SKU) appearing multiple times in a list

The outcomes of poor quality data

Neglecting to address poor quality data in a timely manner can result in serious consequences. Despite this, a survey by Gartner found that nearly 60% of organizations fail to measure the yearly financial cost of poor data quality, which can average around $15 million annually.

The consequences of bad data go beyond just financial costs. It can lead to a variety of issues such as:

• Increased customer churn
• Real-time errors
• Inconsistencies in multichannel commerce information
• Delivery errors
• Higher resource consumption
• Negative reviews and comments on social media
• Inaccurate metrics
• Decreased productivity
• Increased spam and unsubscribes
• Missed opportunities for upselling
• Frustration within sales and marketing departments
• Loss of revenue

Bad data creates a domino effect of problems for businesses, ultimately leading to poor overall performance.

How to avoid bad data?

Don’t be discouraged by the potential challenges and the unknowns of when the next data issue may arise. Fortunately, there are ways to address and prevent these poor data problems. If you are currently dealing with unhappy customers who have been impacted by bad data, take responsibility and explain that you are taking steps to improve their experience.

This open and honest approach can help repair any damage from a negative customer experience. However, you need a plan and support to ensure that your customers don’t continue to experience bad data issues. Investigate ways to improve the quality of your data.

Improving your product information is not an easy task, as 75% of companies have reported difficulties with standardizing their data, let alone fixing the data itself. Finding a product data management system that can help is the next step towards high-quality data.

Data tools are an effective and efficient way to maintain the quality of your product data. Utilizing a third-party product information management (PIM) software can relieve the burden from businesses and allow them to allocate their time to expanding multichannel and omnichannel commerce.

Use Icecat PIM to save you from bad data

The Icecat PIM is user-friendly, multilingual and will make the life of product managers much easier. With this single platform, editors can create new products, update rich media content, and distribute a brand’s information to all its channel partners automatically. For instance, Amazon, MediaMarkt, Walmart, and Carrefour all download product content from Icecat.

Icecat’s Vendor central is a free of charge content delivery platform that allows brands to upload and manage their product content in Icecat’s environment. Therefore, thousands of Full Icecat users will have access and the possibility to use the original brand product content and implement it on their own web environment.

Icecat services for brands – Product Information Management (PIM) & Syndication Solutions makes the product content delivery easy, fast and most importantly accurate. Therefore, we offer three subscription plans for brands and manufacturers: Vendor Central Starter, Open Icecat and Open Icecat Rich.

Find out more about our solutions and subscription plans here.

Irina Popa