Essential vs. Enriched Product Data
Today’s online market is challenging. Consumers move fast, and their decisions are often based on the smallest factors (like a millisecond’s difference in page load speed or the color of a subscription button).
In e-commerce, there are other seemingly small factors that weigh in big-time, like the length of a paragraph in your product description or the angle of a product photo.
A strong and unwavering focus on consumers’ total digital experience is essential to get sales online today. This consumer focus is not just about the products you sell, it’s also about how you educate consumers about those products.
The root of that education isn’t found in your marketing strategies, either—it’s in your product data.
Think of it this way: marketing collateral with a flashy image and stirring headline releases pleasure signals in the brain when a “need” or “pain point” is satisfied, if only in our imagination. We picture ourselves crossing the finish lines of whatever we’re racing toward, be it comfy leggings, cheaper potato chips, or a new smartphone.
Once we spark that interest and get someone’s imagination whirring, they navigate to our product page. We then have to communicate how our product satisfies the need we just agitated.
To do that, we optimize our product data.
Ecommerce has become the mainstay of the “new normal,” and the quality of product information has become more important than ever. With the absence of being able to physically pick a product up or try it on, we have to improve and augment the information we share about the stuff we make and sell.
To make the process as straightforward as possible, we break product data down into two categories:
- Essential product data
- Enriched product data
These two categories were once mutually exclusive, but today they’ve shifted significantly. Understanding the role of both is vital to get consumers the information they need in the shortest window possible.
What is essential product data?
Defining essential product data is simple once you see the common thread. Just open one of your product pages and follow along as we split the product information into the first of these two fundamental categories.
Essential product data includes:
- Product titles
- Product descriptions
- Feature bullet points
- Hero product image(s)
- Metadata
- Weight, size, and other physical specifications
- Technical specifications like speed, megapixels, etc.
- And any other specific specs for certain products like ingredients or warnings
Take note that the hero image is the only graphic included in essential product data, whereas the rest of the graphics we talk about are considered enriched product data. Otherwise, essential product data is made up of the 100% text-based information you plug into your listings.
Interestingly, that definition has shown recent signs of an upcoming shift. Keep reading to learn more.
What is enriched product data?
Understanding the two types of product data helps you understand how to fit your product information puzzle together. It also helps you prioritize.
Essential data is a must. There’s no way a product listing will be complete without it.
Enriched product information, on the other hand, was once considered a luxury. That perception has changed, however, especially in the last year. A big part of that was shaped by changing consumer expectations. New technologies are another force propelling enriched data into the limelight.
In e-commerce, enriched product data is now the single best tool to stand out and boost conversions.
Enriched product data includes:
- Enriched product descriptions (adding things like callouts and CTAs)
- Virtual product tours and 360-degree tours
- “View inside” experiences
- Product comparison charts
- Instruction manuals
- AR-immersive experiences (like a “virtual try-on”)
- Product photos and videos
Product photos and videos are the lowest-hanging fruit to improve product listings with enhanced data. Subsequently, in today’s increasingly competitive landscape, it’s these photos and videos that have migrated away from the “enriched” product data category in favor of “essential.”
That is to say, based on today’s competition and changing consumer expectations, photos and videos are no longer a luxury in e-commerce. Today, they are as essential as your product titles and descriptions.
Why Photo and Video Moved Categories
A picture’s worth 1,000 words, they say. It’s cliché, but some things are cliché for a reason.
With a 44% growth in e-commerce activity in 2020, consumers are buying things they never thought of buying online before. There are also millions of new consumers buying online who never felt comfortable before or who never saw the need.
With the increase in demand and the expansion into new consumer adoption groups, photos have filled a fundamental gap in the e-commerce buyer experience. Specifically, they bring consumers on board to buy things they would have insisted on touching or trying on before.
As a result, product photos and videos have ushered in a new era where consumers don’t even wonder when they’ll shop in person again. They’re perfectly comfortable doing so from the comfort of their couches.
Photos and videos are the linchpins for the new buyer experience. E-commerce brands and direct-to-consumer (D2C) manufacturers have realized this, and now the best way to stand out among competitors is to ensure your audio-visual content is better than the next guy’s.
Specifically, things like 3D renderings, high-resolution photos, videos showing a product in its intended environment, and even enriched photos and videos with overlays showing added information will help you stand out. Partnering with an e-commerce development company to implement new tech has never held so many exciting possibilities.
Audio-visual product data can be imagined in any format, such as:
- Create product photo-based infographics
- 3D renderings of products in their intended environment
- Photos of products from every angle
- Photos and videos made sharable from within your listings
- Shoppable product images
- Photo-rich product guides
You can also use the same photos and videos from your product data library to beef up other content for more engaging blogs and social posts. Without a doubt, the future of e-commerce is image-rich.
Product Data Enrichment Services and Enriched Product Data
“Product data enrichment services and enriched product data?”
That’s a mouthful.
Product data enrichment services are another buzzword these days in e-commerce. Intuitively, you can imagine that these services enhance product data. However, they do not just enhance “enriched” product data, despite including “enrichment” in the name.
As it happens, these services can also enhance essential product data.
Learning about data enrichment comes at a moment when many of you reading this article might be thinking, “wow, this data stuff is great, but I’m swimming through months of work just cleaning up our essential product data. I won’t have the bandwidth for anything else.”
If you want to sell, though, you don’t have much choice. 87% of consumers today say it’s “unlikely” they would consider a product with incorrect product information. And sometimes, they’re left to judge the “correctness” for themselves based on their perception of the product data in the listing.
That’s exactly why data enrichment services exist. These services review your dataset (both essential and enriched) to strengthen the quality, so you sell more. It’s done without you finding the time or learning the optimizations yourself.
Brands selling online that want to make it to market on time have to manage their product data in a frictionless workflow. That means aggregating product data in a central, cloud-based platform where all the departments that need it have access to a single source of truth. Only complete and accurate product data can be optimized.
Get started by taking advantage of data enrichment. Specifically, with these services, you get:
- Basic clean-up of spelling, capitalization, and formatting errors
- Correction of missing attributes and bullet points
- Re-categorization into correct categories and sub-categories
- Correction of styles
- Addition of missing pricing
- Updates to existing imagery, including image clipping, photo retouching, and alternate background embedding
- Completion of unique product descriptions with multiple versions if needed
- Optimizations to titles, romance copy, and product page information
- Optimizations for search engines and specific marketplace search algorithms
To organize and optimize your essential and enriched product data from descriptions to specs and photos and more, in today’s e-commerce environment there’s the added consideration of channels. E-commerce today is multichannel. A brand is likely selling on Amazon in addition to other marketplaces and even their e-commerce website.
Essential and enriched product data all need to be “versioned” to account for this. One platform will have a different character limit on product titles than the next. Another platform will have different size restrictions on uploaded photos. The consumers differ from platform-to-platform, and all your data should be geared toward the people who will be on that channel.
Fortunately, product information management software (PIM) was designed to aggregate and manage all your product data—including its multiple versions. The cost of not using a PIM has become excruciatingly high for e-commerce brands today, starting with the time spent simply cleaning up product data to launch to market.
Check the health of both your essential and enriched product data on Amazon to get started.