For an e-commerce business, collecting data is a crucial part of the job. How a company gathers, stores, processes, analyzes and uses that data can dictate how successful they become. Poor data hygiene can be detrimental as it causes the wrong decisions to be made.
Data cleansing for e-commerce saves time, effort, and money while making a business more efficient. Tools to clean up data can remove duplicate records, check the formatting, resolve incomplete fields, and refine marketing lists. Each of these features ensures data adds value rather than being left dormant or redundant within a database.
The bottom line of data cleansing for e-commerce
Gallup research shows that organizations that effectively utilize customer behavior insights will outperform the competition by as much as 25% in the context of gross margins. Accurate and up-to-date data is the only way to make the most of the opportunity, allowing for personalization and better customer experiences.
Clean and compliant
Data cleansing for e-commerce businesses helps to keep a clean database that complies with regulatory standards. For example, General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR) in the EU dictates that companies are duty-bound to have accurate and current information about their customers. Data cleansing tools will eliminate old data, remove duplicates, and enrich customer records to meet business compliance.
Customer communications
Incorrect data leads to unnecessary costs in customer communications. For example, if you have a record with an incorrect mailing address, the buyer will never receive their product, and you will have double the shipping costs. Data cleansing tools for e-commerce can verify addresses and mitigate the risk of wrong addresses. The same concept applies to email addresses and telephone numbers.
Fraud risk
In the US, the cost of fraud for large e-commerce merchants selling digital goods is up 6.6% in 2020 against the previous year. People will visit an e-commerce site with malicious intent, such as false credit card information and identity theft. Data cleansing for e-commerce will verify the data they enter at the source, reducing the cost of fraud.
Time and resource
With data collection increasing, it is impossible to append every record that comes into your systems manually. Small businesses spend a lot of time and money checking records and still may not achieve 100% accuracy. Data cleansing tools can automate checks with a set of rules to instantly validate customer data. Although there will be an initial expense, you can expect a strong return on investment by freeing up human resources and enhancing the customer experience.
Better analytics
Reporting on incorrect data can be damaging for an e-commerce business. For example, if Amazon were to provide customers with product recommendations that are not relevant, people wouldn’t buy as many items. Data cleansing for e-commerce guarantees high-quality data that drives the correct insight and decisions.
Real-time verification
Online shopping experiences need to be fast and easy. However, those features can unintentionally cause consumers to mistype details, leading to inconsistencies in the data. Data cleansing tools for e-commerce will verify customer data entry in real-time, sorting it at the point of sale, and making sure there are no negative experiences.
Product management
How you organize an e-commerce website can be the difference in making or not making a sale. If a customer finds the product they want, they will read the description and make a decision. When definitions are incorrect, it leads to customers ordering the wrong products and costly returns. Data cleansing for e-commerce should also account for ensuring that product data is accurate.
Summary
Data cleansing for e-commerce ensures that you have clean, consistent, and up-to-date data in your back office systems and website. Although the technology may have a cost attached to it, the benefits of time-saving, customer experience, and security guarantee you still get a return on investment. If you are looking to cleanse your eCommerce database, StrategicDB can help!