A recent Yeoman study of over 1,000 items sold on Amazon found a whopping 70% contained errors or did not follow Amazon’s own best practice recommendations for providing product details.  This study further showed the same level of inaccuracy on Google and Bing product searches. This is a maddening problem that plagues manufacturers in every industry.  Once a product is “out there,” resellers, partners, distributors and reviewers end up shaping and revising the product details that your customers are going to use to make their purchase decision.

What’s a manufacturer to do once their products head out to the channel?  Manufacturers who don’t understand how product details evolve online end up with a mish-mash of ‘ugly baby’ product details that hurt their sales, offline and online.

There key components you need to make sure you have:

1. Baseline data components that can be offered to any partner or the general public: It's amazing how many manufacturers and publishers claim they have great data only to find out its on a spreadsheet somewhere in engineer or marketing.  If you're data isn't in an easily acessible format that partners can get, you can't expect them to get it right.  There are 64 "standard" fields that every manufacturer could pull together and offer up
2. Monitor the web.  If you don't have a program that monitors your product details on the major channels (including eBay, Amazon, and the general web) you can't take any action
3. Have an action plan: It's one thing to set it up and monitor, but you need to make sure you're ready with a plan to address bad data as you find it.

Yeoman specializes in working with manufacturers to help understanding their online sales and distribution channels.  Contact us today for a review and assessment of your current data quality online.