Product data is a crucial component of any E-commerce business. You can't sell anything online if it doesn’t have a product description, photos, and maybe even videos. Product data is essentially all this information about your products. But is all this information necessary? Why should you care about it?
What is Product Data?
Product data is information that describes a product. It can be used to communicate:
Information about a product for a customer, such as its description and price.
Information about a product for suppliers, such as what ingredients are required to make it and whether any environmentally friendly processes are used in its manufacturing.
Information about a product for manufacturers, such as the machinery needed to produce it and where it should be stored after production.
What is the Importance of Product Data?
Product data is a collection of information about a product or service that allows you to make decisions based on metrics. These metrics can help you optimize your product, improve your product and perform better analysis and segmentation. Product Data is important helps you understand how well your products are performing in the marketplace, while also helping you understand customer preferences in a particular market segment.
How to create a product data sheet template?
Product data sheets provide details on the benefits, specifications, and usage of a product. The information contained in these documents should be accurate and up-to-date at all times — if you don’t have enough information about your products or need help getting organized, here are some tips to create a product data sheet template:
Make sure the templates are easy to use. Use programs like Microsoft Excel or Google Sheets if creating your own template from scratch. If you're going this route, make sure each column has a header so it's easy for others to use your template. This will allow for easy sorting by category so anyone looking through all available options can quickly find what they need.
Consider if there’s an existing template available that could meet your requirements as well.
What are the different product data sources?
There are many sources of product data.
Manufacturer product catalogs and manuals
Supplier product catalogs
Channel (reseller) product catalogs, often available online or on CD-ROM
Customer-submitted data, either via an online form or via an API call to your application (e.g., eBay) * Third party sources like social media, (e.g., Facebook) or an eCommerce website selling products (e.g., Amazon).
How do you generate product data?
Product data is generated by your business. You and your employees collect information about the products or services you sell. The type of data collected will depend on how your business operates and what information is available on a particular product or service. For example, if you sell jewelry online, it’s likely most customers will purchase online as well — so all product details would come from webpages and entered into an internal system by a salesperson at some point before the sale was made (e-commerce). On the other hand, if you’re selling cow brushes at a farmer’s market, it’s likely that people are going to make their purchases in-person and ask questions about how these brushes work before making a decision — so data would be gathered through conversations with potential customers as well as any observations that would be made during any demos the salespeople would give.
What are some common product data errors and how to fix them?
Using the wrong product data sheet template. There are many types of product data sheets. Use a template that matches your industry and business type.
Not using enough detail in your descriptions. Remember, customers want to know not only what the product is, but also how it works and what makes it unique.
Using incorrect definitions on your sheet or incorrectly describing components in your sheet design (e.g., calling a screwdriver "a drill").
What is the Future of Product Data?
In the future, product data will be a single source of truth. This means all data related to a product will be stored in one place, and it's updated whenever new information comes in. The goal here is to have centralized systems so every user has access to the latest version of any piece of information about a product.
If you're thinking this sounds like an ideal way for your company or organization's supply chain team to run things, you're right! We can make this happen by creating a centralized system for all your products' data—a system to bring together all teams' efforts into one platform with unified data models across departments and locations so everyone can work together seamlessly from any device.
Conclusion
Product data is an important piece of information which helps companies make informed decisions for product manufacturing, marketing, and sales. It’s also one of the most overlooked facets of eCommerce today, since many retailers focus more on website design or SEO ranking instead of creating high-quality content for customers. They don’t see how much revenue could be generated if they invested more time into building up their product database instead.