Clean & Organize
Dirty data and disorganized data are both menaces
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Dirty, inconsistent product data prevents your site search from finding all relevant products. Worse, it makes your customer's job in understanding your products more difficult. Worst, it makes comparing products hard so the Decide & Buy process becomes a headache. To top it off, dirty data makes you look unprofessional.
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Disorganized product data sabotages a customer's ability to get to what they want quickly. Disorganized data usually stems from a poor Category structure.
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Are your categories 3 or more levels deep?
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Do your customers have to drill-drill-drill to get to like products or see attributes by which they can filter?
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Do you have more than 100 categories?
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Does your smallest category either have less than 10% of the products of your largest category or contain as few as 10 products?
If any of the answers to these questions is "yes", you may need to restructure your category structure (taxonomy).
Fixing Dirty Data
There are 4 types of dirty data:
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Incorrect Compounds
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Misspellings
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Abbreviations
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Combos – typically combination of incorrect compound with misspelling or abbreviation
FindWAtt's technology automatically identifies and corrects these problems. Here are some examples along with our assessment of how difficult each correction would be for a human. how many of the changes could you have been sure of making?
Example Transformation of Dirty Data into Clean Data
| Before |
After |
Lftm Brands 5073170 2Qt Alu Wht Teakettle
|
Lifetime Brands 5073170 2-Quart Aluminum White Tea Kettle |
| 1513/16 Inch Oak Medcabinet |
15-13/16 Inch Oak Medicine Cabinet |
| AGR MR 10 " X62' IL PTO H/L |
Auger Mayrath 10 " x 62' In-Line Power Take Off Hydraulic Lift |
| INDIVIDUAL CHANGES |
DIFFICULTY |
| Product |
Dirty |
Clean |
Lo |
Med |
Hi |
1
|
Lftm |
Lifetime |
|
X |
|
| 2Qt |
2 Quart |
X |
|
|
| Alu |
Aluminum |
|
X |
|
| Wht |
White |
X |
|
|
| Teakettle |
Tea Kettle |
X |
|
|
| 2 |
1513/16 |
15-13/16 |
|
X |
|
| MedCabinet |
Medicine Cabinet |
|
X |
|
| 3 |
AGR |
Auger |
|
|
X |
| MR |
Mayrath |
|
|
X |
| 10 “ X62’ |
10” x 62’ |
|
X |
|
| IL |
In-Line |
|
|
X |
| PTO |
Power Take Off |
|
|
X |
| H/L |
Hydraulic Lift |
|
|
X |
Fixing Category Structure
Redoing your category structure (a.k.a. taxonomy) can be a lengthy, time consuming and difficult process. Fortunately, once product attributes have been extracted and improved it’s straightforward to “roll-up” products from the bottom into categories. This is because categories are nothing more than groupings of similar products and similarity is determined by shared attributes. FindWAtt’s “roll-up” technology allows great flexibility in grouping products so creating a taxonomy is not a one-step irrevocable process. In fact, multiple possible taxonomies can be created, with different numbers of levels and different criteria used to group products.