The Critical Role of Product Data in Digital Commerce

Product pages will make or break your eCommerce sale, every time. When shoppers land on a product page, they’re asking: Is this the right product for me? Can I trust what I’m seeing? Will it meet my expectations? The answers to those questions come from the quality, clarity, and consistency of your product data information.

As customers opt for more seamless omnichannel experiences, product data has become the unsung hero—or silent saboteur—of customer satisfaction. From mismatched specs to missing images, even small data discrepancies can create large-scale friction, leading to confusion, lost sales, and erosion of brand trust.

In this post, we’ll explore why product data quality should be at the core of customer experience and how eCommerce leaders can transform that data from chaos to a competitive advantage.

The Hidden Cost of Poor Product Data

The numbers are in: poor data quality costs organizations an average of $12.9 million every year. Yet nearly 60% of companies don’t even measure the financial impact of poor data quality, leaving costly errors, inefficiencies, and missed opportunities hidden in plain sight. In eCommerce, that cost often shows up as something less visible but far more damaging: a broken customer journey.

When product data is incomplete or inaccurate, the customer experience suffers at every touchpoint. The consequences?

Confused or hesitant shoppers who don’t buy
Higher return rates due to mismatched expectations
Frustrated customers who lose trust in your brand
Lower Net Promoter Scores (NPS) and negative reviews
Hours wasted by internal teams correcting or managing product content manually

The reality is that product data doesn’t just influence what customers see online—it shapes what they expect. And when those expectations aren’t met, the consequences are lasting.

Nearly 70% of shoppers say they’re less likely to return to a retailer after a delayed delivery, even if the issue stemmed from something as simple as an inaccurate stock update. And 42% of shoppers say they’ve given up on an online purchase because they didn’t have enough information to make an informed decision.

In a space where trust and clarity drive conversions, your product data is either building confidence or breaking it.

What Good Product Information Management Looks Like

Great product data is actively managed, maintained, and optimized across the entire product lifecycle. When done well, product information management ensures that every touchpoint—whether a product page, marketplace listing, or internal tool—draws from a single source of truth. That means:

Consistency across channels: Product names, specs, and images are aligned, no matter where customers find you: your website, Amazon, social, or retail partners.
Accuracy and completeness: Each product listing includes the right attributes, descriptions, tags, images, dimensions, and localized content needed to support the buying journey.
Speed to market: New products are launched quickly and efficiently, with all required data flowing to the right channels without bottlenecks.
Flexibility for teams: eCommerce, marketing, and CX teams can update or localize content without relying on IT or digging through spreadsheets.
Data governance and control: Changes are tracked, access is managed, and there’s clear ownership of data integrity.

In short, good product information management looks like clarity and control. It enables teams to deliver a better customer experience without reinventing the wheel every time they update a product line. But as any eCommerce leader knows, keeping product data clean, consistent, and channel-ready is easier said than done.

Why Managing Product Data Is So Hard

If great product data is the goal, the reality is far messier. For most growing eCommerce businesses, product information lives across a scattered landscape of spreadsheets, ERPs, supplier portals, shared drives, and eCommerce platforms. Each team—marketing, eCommerce, CX, operations—touches the data, but no one fully owns it. The result? A tangled, error-prone process that creates more friction than flow.

Here’s why managing product data at scale becomes such a challenge:

Too many sources, not enough alignment
When product data is pulled from suppliers, internal systems, and manual entry points, it’s easy for errors to slip through. Case in point: retailers average only 65% inventory accuracy, meaning that more than a third of the time, they can’t say for sure whether an item is in stock or where it is. For comparison, industry benchmarks recommend inventory accuracy rates of 97% or higher.
Manual processes that don’t scale
Copying and pasting product details into multiple systems might work when you have 1200 SKUs… but what about 1002,000?
Channel-specific requirements
Each platform (Amazon, Shopify, BigCommerce, marketplaces) has its own formatting rules, image specs, and attribute requirements. Without a system to adapt, errors multiply.
Lack of visibility and governance
It’s hard to fix what you can’t see. Many teams lack version control, audit trails, or a centralized view of product data health.
Time-consuming updates
Launching a new product, running a seasonal promo, or changing localized content often requires coordination across several departments and tools, delaying go-to-market timelines.

For companies scaling their digital commerce efforts, these challenges can hurt customer experience, erode trust, and make growth unsustainable. So how do you fix it? That’s where product information management (PIM) comes in.

How PIM Solves the Product Data Problem

A Product Information Management (PIM) system is designed to do what spreadsheets and siloed tools can’t: centralize and streamline your product data. With a modern PIM like Jasper, you gain a single source of truth for every product in your catalogue—one that’s built to support omnichannel commerce.

Here’s what PIM makes possible:

Centralized control: Manage all your product data—images, descriptions, specs, translations, categories, tags, and more—from one place.
Channel-specific syndication: Automatically tailor and push product content to every channel with the right formatting, language, and requirements.
Improved collaboration: Give marketing, eCommerce, and CX teams role-based access to contribute, edit, and review content, all while maintaining oversight and version control.
Faster time to market: Launch new products or campaigns without waiting on manual processes. PIM workflows reduce bottlenecks and speed up execution.
Data integrity at scale: Set rules, validations, and workflows to ensure content is always complete, accurate, and compliant.

For eCommerce leaders responsible for customer experience, conversion rates, and brand consistency, PIM is a strategic enabler of scalable CX.

Don’t Let Bad Data Undermine Great CX

If you run a business where product discovery, comparison, and decision-making happen almost entirely online, your product data is the customer experience.

If that data is scattered, inconsistent, or slow to update, it becomes a customer problem. One that impacts trust, conversions, and ultimately, your reputation.

Ready to take control of your product data and deliver a seamless, consistent experience at scale? Talk to our team about how Jasper can help.