“Garbage In, Garbage out…” or so the saying goes ...

The concept asserts that the quality of the information coming out cannot be better than the quality of the information going in. This saying is used in data science and manufacturing and often when talking about product data, like in this article, or this one. 

Today, we are here to bust that myth as it pertains to product data and eCommerce. With the right tools in place, you can put garbage product data in and output high-quality product data, ready for eCommerce. 

Product data quality on your eCommerce site is critical for SEO, on-site search, navigation, and the shopper experience. The product information available and its presentation strongly influence whether a shopper will buy or leave your website. For retailers with large product ranges and product information sourced from multiple vendors – cleaning the disparate data received into a normalized format is a challenge. A challenge, most often met by manual manipulation in spreadsheets – a highly inefficient and unrewarding task. Automating these processes lifts this burden of time and cost, ensuring vendor data is standardized efficiently into a format ready for your eCommerce site.  

For eCommerce store owners, managing variants and parent-child product relationships are essential for maintaining your store’s digital products and eCommerce success. Variant management combined with categorization can account for up to 20% of the time spent on content management. But it doesn’t have to take this much of your time. Knowledge is power, and in this article, we’ll dive more into how you can simplify variant management and what tools are available to cut down the manual work and improve productivity in this area.  

For eCommerce store owners, product data classification is an essential task in building their website and maintaining the digital products in their store. For those new to eCommerce, tackling product classification for the first time, the topic can seem filled with jargon and confusing terminology! Below we’ve provided a brief guide as to what product classification is and what each of the key terms means to help you get started.

What are Product Data Transformations?

Product data transformation changes data from one format, structure or value to another. 

Automated product data transformations are an effective method of data cleansing for eCommerce, normalizing and preparing supplier product data ready for an eCommerce website or PIM. 

What is Product Data Transformation?

Data transformation is, simply, the change of data from one format, structure, or value to another.  

Product information or product data, is the information you will see displayed on product detail pages on eCommerce websites, such as images, descriptions, price, weight, dimensions and SKU numbers.

So together, it is the process of changing product data or product details from one state to another. Data transformation is essential to the activities of product data integration and product data management.