The Hardest Lessons to Learn in Product Data Management

Data. It’s everywhere, but it also isn’t anything new. In fact, when it comes to product data, it’s been a fundamental aspect of commerce and manufacturing from the day humans started making things.

As the world began to embrace the internet, however, the amount of data in the world started to grow exponentially. What is new is that, through this recent e-commerce boom, product data has become more important than ever before.

Seeing is believing, and while that still rings true for successful e-com brands, “seeing” a product online vs. in-store are simply different experiences. A picture can only tell a customer so much about a specific product. It becomes pretty clear pretty quickly that from the design process to the moment the customer leaves a review, proper product data management is essential in e-commerce.

Far too many brands don’t prioritize quality product data management, or don’t do as much as they could. That can make for some tough e-commerce lessons to learn in product data management. Let’s take a look.

Collaboration

As business structures continue to grow more horizontal, collaboration needs to be a stronger fundamental principle of any brand. Dividing the workflow up too much can not only be bad for team culture and morale, but it can also be counterproductive.

Consider the product description under a listing on your website. The visual elements of the listing are only half of the picture, the textual description and details are what need to bring the product to life for the customer. If the description is lackluster or even inaccurate, you’re likely to miss out on valuable sales and customers.

A proper PDM system not only helps you keep data clean and tidy, but it centralizes the data to a single source, which can allow for collaboration across the brand in real-time. A copywriter might not know too much about a specific product, but a technical employee sure does. This might not seem like a product data management problem at first glance, but sure enough, a proper PDM system is a strong solution.

Automation and scaling

Especially as your brand starts to grow, automation is going to become vital. As a small brick-and-mortar shop, you’re able to check on inventory, production, and seasonal demand relatively easily with a bit of help from your team. Once you go to multiple channels online, this quickly becomes impossible.

Impossible, that is, without proper PDM. The great thing about data is that it’s just information, and every decision you make is based on information. That means, if your product data is managed well enough, decisions can be practically automatic.

With a great PDM system, production processes can run as new orders come in, product descriptions can be updated automatically, and you can scale your brand much larger and faster than what would be possible without a bit of automation.

Mistakes happen

Unfortunately, mistakes always happen. We’ve probably all had that disappointing moment at some point or another of excitedly tearing open a package just to learn that what we ordered…just wasn’t what we had in mind. Maybe the size was off, the color, the material—whatever the case might be, the disappointment stems from one thing: incorrect product data.

Sometimes, as brands, mistakes just happen. We have to own up to that. But mistakes happen a lot more often with poor product data management. Poor PDM can manifest in all sorts of ways: inaccurate product descriptions, mistakes in production, mistakes in order fulfillment, etc.

More importantly, when mistakes like these happen, your brand image takes a serious hit. With great product data management, these unnecessary mistakes are minimized. Sure, being 100% mistake-free is impossible, but the more you can avoid perfectly preventable mistakes, the better.

Customer service

All of these previous points culminate in one thing: customer service. Perhaps the most difficult underlying e-commerce lesson to learn the hard way through all of this is that poor product data management means poor customer service. From the moment a customer visits your site to the moment they receive their order, poor product data management has the potential to turn this experience into a bad review.

The product description might be inaccurate, the picture might be wrong, details might be missing—whatever the problem is, if your customers have to take a gamble at any point in the process, that’s a product data management issue. On the flip side, of course, excellent product data management plays a fundamental part in making sure the customer has the best experience possible.

You need great PDM

It’s an e-commerce lesson that every brand needs to learn at some point and some, unfortunately, learn it the hard way. Great product data management is essential for e-commerce. From production to advertising to sales and distribution, the quality of your PDM will be representative of your brand experience for customers and employees alike.

Fortunately, modern PDM systems serve as a great solution to all of these problems, and can help make sure these lessons aren’t costly for your brand. Are you ready to take your PDM to the next level?