If you are a merchant (retailer or a B2B dealer) of tangible goods a huge challenge in today’s data driven world is the get complete product information from your suppliers being the importers, brand owners and/or manufacturers of the products.
There are plenty of bad ways of trying to do that:
- Send them a spreadsheet to be filled in
- Build a supplier portal where they can do the work
- Get the data from a data pool
- Outsource the collection process to someone far away
Sean Sinclair sums this up nicely in the LinkedIn article called Feeding the Monster – Product Data Onboarding for ‘Hundreds and Thousands’…
Coincidentally Sean and I at the same time worked with these challenges at two different major competing UK distributors/dealers of building materials up in the West Midlands.
The only solution will be to create a win-win situation for both manufacturers and merchants as explained in the post Merchants vs Manufacturers in the Information Age.
Liliendahl on Data Quality 