According to recent data from Baymard Institute, the average documented online shopping cart abandonment rate across all industries is just under 70 percent. In other words, seven out of every ten customers will leave your website in the middle of shopping. Low conversion rates are very troubling to e-commerce store owners, especially when they do everything to drive traffic to the website.
So, how do you convince customers to stay put and follow through? Three words – E-commerce Product Enrichment.
E-commerce Product Enrichment
Simply put, to enrich means to add value or improve. Online stores must enrich their products with all the relevant information about the product that will be useful to the customer. Underperforming e-commerce stores can facilitate faster product discovery, accurate search results, and better customer satisfaction with product data enrichment services.
In the context of e-commerce, product enrichment ensures that the product data contains all the attributes a buyer will ever need to make an informed choice based on correct information. Correspondingly, this will build trust and increase engagement with customers and drive conversion and sales.
Let’s use the example of a Smart Light to illustrate the varying degrees of enrichment:
In the above image, the customer only gets fundamental information about the product. Therefore, it isn’t much valuable in making an informed decision.
The second description has a customer-ready presentation. It comes with an image and has all the adequate information to make a purchasing decision. In other words, the product data is fully enriched.
As can be seen, enriched product content has product descriptions, manufacturer specifications, images, videos, ratings, customer reviews, and any other information you have collected about the product.
Reasons For The High Rate Of Cart Abandonment
Slow product discovery
Insufficient product data
Poor quality images
Improper categorization
Irrelevant product recommendation
Incorrect product comparison chart
Slow site speed
Brand interference
Obviously, the root cause of most of the reasons given above is the poor quality of product data. With this in mind, online retailers should create high-performing, well-worded product descriptions to drive sales. Remember that you are vying for your customer’s limited attention and have to come up with a better product offering than your competitors. In short, your content should be good enough to sell itself.
How To Take Full Advantage Of Your Product Page
Appearance is critical in creating the first impression. Hence, we have many design keys that help you in wooing customers to make a purchase. Keeping a neutral color palette and striking tones in areas you want to highlight is one such element. The aesthetics must be uniform among all your product pages.
Well-crafted Product Content
Persuasive product copy that is Search Engine optimized will help online marketplaces to acquire higher search engine rankings. That is, rich product descriptions with relevant keywords and required tags make it easier for search engines to sort and rank them higher, leading to better product discovery.
Moreover, enhanced product content can also drastically bring down product returns. According to a worldwide survey of online shoppers, 27% of the products were returned because it did not match the description provided.
Reasons for returning online purchases. Source: statista.com
Standardizing Product Attributes
Every product attribute must add value to the purchase decision. Standardizing product attributes will help retailers with optimal merchandising across all platforms and improving customer experience. Using a predefined data format for the entire website will help customers access the most relevant information quickly.
Classifying Products Correctly
Most e-commerce sites have several products listed and categorized incorrectly. Miscategorization makes it difficult for customers to find what they are looking for. Also, it confuses web crawlers, leading to low SEO rankings. Developing proper product taxonomies and ensuring all products are categorized correctly is crucial for e-commerce sales.
Data Cleansing And Error Elimination
Data cleansing and error elimination is an essential step in the product data enrichment process. Product data needs to be 100% accurate to prevent buying errors. Cleanse your current data for inconsistency. Likewise, fixing product metadata helps your customers gather the right information and Search Engines to correctly crawl your product pages.
Enhancing Digital Assets
Retailers should enhance and optimize the images for Search Engines to promote customer engagement. In fact, rich digital assets and images will help in capturing customer attention and reducing bounce rates. Additionally, having high-resolution product images build customer confidence, as they can understand what exactly they are going to get.
Upselling Aspirational Products
Upselling is an excellent sales enhancement technique, which has helped many e-commerce websites promote their premium products. Displaying superior products and services alongside certain products will attract customers to make a purchase. In effect, data enrichment helps you to generate more revenue.
Also Read: How Brands use Data to Enhance Consumer Experience
Product Enrichment Checklist
E-commerce product enrichment helps you to provide a holistic buying experience to your customers. Here are some product information management guidelines to keep your content compelling, complete, and consistent:
Conduct a Product Data Quality Assessment. Thoroughly analyze and audit the product data to identify possible gaps, errors, or inconsistencies. Subsequently, make a plan based on the findings to rectify the mistakes and fill the gaps.
Extract reliable data from multiple sources, including the manufacturer’s website, catalogs, brochures, etc.
Find duplicate entries and remove them.
Perform thorough spellcheck to ensure there are no spelling errors. Similarly, do not overlook errors in abbreviations.
Strictly adhere to the standards and conventions specific to your region (or the region of your target audience) to avoid ambiguity. Also, expand abbreviations wherever required.
Make your product descriptions factually correct, unique, and keyword-rich. However, it should be easy to read and understand.
Make your product page visible to Search Engines through on-page optimization.
Conduct an exhaustive data validation.
Edit and enhance images according to the regulations of the platform you use. Adjusting image size and resolution, removing unwanted elements, changing background, adding or removing logo, watermarks, text, etc., are some of the best image editing processes you can follow.
To sum up, the benefits of product data enhancement outweigh the costs incurred. If you are looking for data services to aid you in product data enrichment services, reach out to our experts at Datahut.