To write good, compelling product content, you need sufficient product information. The problem is, suppliers or manufacturers often share sparse or incomplete information. They may even provide only a product image or product title.
With hundreds of thousands of products to push out monthly, it’s humanly impossible to manually research for points to use in creating your content.
That’s where product data enrichment comes in. It helps enrich your product data with relevant information automatically pulled from the web. In this article, we'll discuss what it is, why it’s important for ecommerce brands, and how you can harness its power to level up your product pages.
What Is Ecommerce Product Data Enrichment?
Product data enrichment refers to the process of improving and expanding your existing product information to make it more complete, accurate and compelling for customers.
This typically involves adding more details, specifications, descriptions and other data that makes your product pages more comprehensive and compelling.
It increases conversions and helps shoppers make a more informed decision, thereby reducing ecommerce returns.
Why Is Product Data Enrichment Important in Ecommerce?
Boosts SEO and Discoverability
One major benefit of enriched product data is improved search visibility off-site and on-site.
With more detailed descriptions using relevant keywords, your listings can rank better and become much easier for customers to find through search engines like Google or marketplaces like Amazon.
On the website, enrichment helps add product tags to improve product searchability and discoverability. This could be in the form of product recommendations or on-site search. This helps interested buyers locate your offerings more easily when browsing or searching for specific features.
Creates Better Shopping Experiences
Beyond just finding your products, enriched data makes it simpler for shoppers to evaluate them.
Comprehensive details on materials, dimensions, certifications and other key attributes allow customers to determine if an item meets their needs.
This elevates the entire shopping journey as online shoppers don’t have to second-guess their decisions or cross-check with forums or third-party sites for validation.
Improves Conversion Rates
Ecommerce sites don’t give users the opportunity to touch, feel and try the products like physical stores do.
Therefore, online shoppers need a lot more information to figure out if the product matches their use case and preferences.
Having detail-rich product pages gives them enough confidence to move forward with the purchase.
Minimizes Ecommerce Returns
Some of the biggest reasons for online product returns are mismatches between the product and its description, as well as issues with style and size fit.
These can be managed with more accurate and complete product information.
Product data enrichment fills gaps and cleans your data, ensuring it is standardized and fact-checked.
Methods for Enriching Ecommerce Product Data
Here are some ways brands enrich their product data:
[image - Ecommerce Product Data Enrichment Methods]
Manual Enrichment
This method involves manually searching the web for additional information about your product. This could be from competitor sites, marketplaces, forums and reviews where you can pick out attributes that customers mention frequently.
You could also copy paste data provided to you, like images, spec sheets from manufacturers, or vendor portals.
Ecommerce Product Data Enrichment Services
Another option is to outsource it a third-party service provider. Experts will research and enrich your existing product data from various sources, taking that manual task off your team's plate.
Automated enrichment
Automated enrichment uses AI or machine learning to gather data from various sources automatically and updates them in your PIM.
On Hypotenuse AI's ecommerce product data enrichment software, our AI will crawl the web, UPC or any spreadsheets to enrich your product details. Then, it’ll use this information to generate product content for your product pages.
How to enrich your product data
1. Collecting Data
It all starts by gathering data from various sources such as vendor portals, spec sheets, competitor product pages or review sites. It could even be manually extracting information from looking at the product or its images.
2. Cleaning and Standardizing Data
The next step is to correct any spelling errors and standardize the data. For example, “c.m.” and “centimeters” can all be updated to “cm”, or all texts can be converted to a consistent format, such as US English.
3. Enriching Data
Enrichment involves enhancing the cleaned data by adding valuable details. This includes comprehensive product descriptions, high-quality images, and other essential attributes.
4. Integrating Data
Finally, to get this enriched data to relevant teams, you’ll need to integrate it with existing systems. This includes systems like your ecommerce platform or PIM system.
Best Practices for Product Data Enrichment
Prioritize Top Selling Products
Apply the 80/20 rule—start by enriching the top 20% of products generating 80% of your sales. These are your star performers with the highest competition. Dedicate time to fleshing out details that give them an edge.
Keep it concise
Avoid overcomplicating things by stuffing descriptions with too much jargon or unnecessary details. Keep it clear, concise and focused on highlighting key benefits and uses.
Leverage AI & Tools
AI-powered enrichment tools can save you tons of time and effort. They automatically clean data, fix errors, standardize values and generate rich product descriptions from technical specs. With features like automated categorization, they ensure consistent and reliable product data at scale.
Prioritize Visuals
Don't just focus on text. High-quality images and videos are crucial for giving customers a comprehensive understanding of your products. Showcase multiple angles, product dimensions and use cases through rich media.
Optimize for Search
Incorporate relevant keywords and key phrases into titles, descriptions and tags to improve search visibility. But balance this with a natural tone that doesn't seem stuffed with keywords. Use tools to suggest high-volume, relevant terms.
Review & Refine
Always review your enriched data and adjust parameters to refine results. Keep track using unique identifiers like SKUs or model numbers. Link to manufacturer sites as authoritative sources. Test different attribute combinations in tags for better discoverability.
Conclusion
Ecommerce data enrichment is a powerful way to improve your online store's product pages and overall customer experience.
Structured data and machine-readable specs ensure your items get found and displayed properly across channels. And optimizing titles, descriptions, attributes, and more helps connect customers with the right products faster.
While it takes some work, the payoff in higher conversions, lower returns, and boosted SEO is tremendous. If you’d like to explore automated product data enrichment, reach out to us at sales@hypotenuse.ai.
