May 09 2022

Product data cleansing – what it is and why it is important for brands and online retailers.

Cheryl Joy

Content Writer


What is product data cleansing?

Product data cleansing is the process of identifying inaccurate and outdated data points from the database, table, or data set and correcting them to create an accurate, complete and consistent product feed to enhance customer experience. The key focus of product cleansing is to remove duplicate values, inconsistent data formats and populate the missing and inaccurate values.

Product data cleansing and product optimization go hand in hand, but it is necessary to correct inaccurate data, populate missing values and standardize product data before enhancing a product.

Need for product cleansing

The simple answer is to provide a great customer experience and increase product sales. Today’s ecommerce organizations are adopting strict rules for product feed because inaccurate and messy feed is not accepted. Though it is accepted, it is unlikely to perform well in the market as it leaves customers confused and unsatisfied.

Did you know?

  • 65% of customers consider product images significant when buying a product.
  • 75% say detailed product descriptions are why they click “Buy.”
  • 80% like to refine their search with product attributes.

Key benefits of product cleansing

  • Perform your job with speed and ease: When your product feeds are complete, accurate, and standardized, it is easy for you to manage your feeds and optimize your product. You can easily search and filter through the feeds for analysis purposes.
  • Enhance visibility and conversions: When a product feed has complete and accurate information, it is more likely to be found under relevant searches. This helps shoppers to have enough information about a product to make an informed purchasing decision.
  • Enhanced customer satisfaction: Shoppers look for customized and complete information to buy a product. By leveraging this quality and meeting their expectations, you will have happy customers who help you increase sales of the product.

Key characteristics of data cleansing

Product feeds are in different sizes, formats, and conditions. Each feed varies in the kind of cleansing they need. The four universal characteristics of a strong and complete product feed are:

  • Standardized feed

A standardized product feed is uniform and follows a consistent format.

Brand format

Before cleansing

After cleansing

Tommy

Tommy Hilfiger

Hilfiger

Tommy Hilfiger

Price format

Before cleansing

After cleansing

50 $

50 USD

$ 60

60 USD

Color format

Before cleansing

After cleansing

Dark green

Green

Sea green

Green

  • Complete

A complete product feed contains all the required attributes for a given channel.

Before cleansing

Product Title

Color

Reebok walk shoes

Blue

Adidas Black running shoe

—-

After cleansing

Product Title

Color

Reebok walk shoes

Blue

Adidas running shoe

Black

  • Accurate

An accurate product data feed is updated and true.

Before cleansing

Product Title

Brand

Reebok walk shoes

Reebok

Adidas running shoe

Adidas

After cleansing

Product Title

Brand

Reebok walk shoes

Reebok

Adidas running shoe

Adidas

Product data cleansing solutions

The methodology behind product data cleansing is linked with the challenges an organization sees with its product feed. Each product feed has its attributes, and there is no fixed syntax that provides a solution for data cleansing. However, there are few approaches that are being widely followed for an effective and valuable product data cleansing.

  • Product data cleaning tools

The data cleaning tools are driven by analytics and use algorithms, look-up tables, and rules to examine data for any inaccuracy, completeness, and inconsistency. With the rule-based validation, you can add data quality control for incoming data.

  • Third-party vendors on cloud platforms

There are several third-party vendors who offer data cleansing services for your product feeds.

  • Data Governance frameworks

Due to the increase in data-driven eCommerce trends, organizations must adopt a framework that embeds data governance into their business strategy for product feed governance, data quality control, and cataloging tasks.

Data cleansing solution by Unbxd PIM

Unbxd Product information management (PIM) involves a group of systems that enables you to automate catalog management, gather data, edit it, and enrich the product data to provide the best customer experience. With Unbxd PIM, you own the digital shelf. It lets you concentrate on your online sales while Unbxd takes care of data enrichment. Unbxd PIM tool lets you streamline your business when you are struggling with volumes and varieties of data.

For more information and an overview of Unbxd PIM, see here.

Unbxd follows the following best practices for its data cleansing solution.

  • Develops a Quality Plan for product feed: Unbxd develops data quality KPIs from the initially set data standards and expectations of product data.
  • Standardizing incoming data: Even before starting the cleansing process, Unbxd follows a standard operating procedure to ensure that only quality data is entering the PIM, ERP, or CRM, and so on. This eases the detection of duplicate data.

Validating accuracy: Unbxd data cleansing solution is embedded with tools that carry out real-time validation to check the accuracy of product data. The PIM tool helps the personnel to understand the impact of low-quality data on business revenue and to forecast and justify future funding.

Unbxd PIM offering

Customers’ expectations of product information are increasing day by day. Unless you provide complete, clear, accurate, and updated information on a product, customers are not ready to buy a product. Hence, modern sellers must design their catalog strategically to increase customer satisfaction and product sales.

Unbxd PIM helps modern sellers to increase their sales and meet customer expectations by delivering enriched product information.

How does the Unbxd PIM tool work?

The Unbxd PIM tool enhances the overall quality of product data. It allows you to organize, centralize, transform and distribute product information to ecommerce channels with less effort.

For detailed information on how the PIM tool works and its features, see https://unbxd.com/pim-features.

Go-to-market with Unbxd PIM tool

  • Two-way communication that enables you to import and export data across eCommerce platforms.
  • Ability to publish product data on marketplaces.
  • Provides seamless native PIM integration with ecommerce platforms.
  • Content validation with just one click.
  • Generates readiness and error reports.
  • Task assignment to concern roles from the report.
  • Enables you to configure business needs and build customized adapters.
  • Enables import and export of product data with API integrations.

Book a demo to explore the features of Unbxd PIM


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