Edgenet's Vice President Noel Pennington was featured on Webmaster Radio, where he discussed the power of structured and complete product data. Noel, whose resume includes PeopleSoft, Oracle and PayPal as a Senior Product Manager, explained Edgenet's offerings and why structured product data is so valuable for commerce today. Check it out by clicking here.

Edgenet's Senior Vice President Tom Clement will be a featured speaker as part of Chicago's Big Data Week. The Edge was able to get some time to talk product data - where it is today, and where it's going - with Clement. 

THE EDGE: Tom, you’re listening to some of the biggest and most influential names and brands – how important is quality, structured product data to them, and why?

Tom Clement: It’s very near or at the top of every major brands priority list. The reason is twofold. 

First, the dynamic shift that is here today where companies must mirror mobile and in home shoppers with in-store. The experience needs to be exactly the same online as in the store and the only way to bring that experience online is to have a complete and accurate data set. 

Second is the rapid change that occurs with product information.

Talk about prescient. Over 15 months ago, The Edge committed a flagrant act of foresight by detailing what many considered to be the first use of the term "showrooming." 

In our post, we described the steps Target was taking to combat Amazon - specifically, to limit the behavior of "showrooming" - essentially serving as a showroom for products, where shoppers would visit, touch, feel, study...and then ultimately, purchase on Amazon.

The term has entered the mainstream, as exhibited by this cool "showrooming" infographic. Check it out, because the statistics in the infographic swerve into an industry Edgenet has been working with - the Pet Industry. The infographic details the top five retailers at risk for showrooming, with a major big-box pet store listed as the second most likely retailer to be at risk. 

Edgenet figures your anxiety regarding showrooming should be in a direct inverse relationship with the quality of your product data. The better your data, the less your anxiety about showrooming and all of the other waves of consumer behaviors to come. 

Google the term "buyer's guide," and you'll find...a whole heck of a lot of buyer's guides. Not a lot about the the history of buyer's guides, or the evolution of buyer's guides...just buyer's guides. For horses, AM radios, and yo-yos...just about anything. 

It looks like no one knows where buyer's guides came from, not even the trusty Wikipedia. All we know is, they're here. And...they need help. A perfunctory look at a few buyers guides will reveal an almost-universal crater of functionality and technology. Why can't the yo-yo guide ask the user if they want a classic, flared gap, or modified shape and let them choose? Or, why can't the guide ask a question like: Are you looking for a yo-yo to perform looping tricks?

We blame unstructured product data.

Structured product data will improve your organic SEO results. So says a recent article at the website "practical ecommerce: Insights for Online Merchants."

The article, written by Jill Kocher, indicates that early decisions regarding site structure and how it uses a product catalog can "have surprising ramifications for SEO." 

The secret is understanding HOW shoppers are searching for your products and organizing your website's navigation and pages to mirror and reveal product data that matches popular searches.

We're not saying anything about this particular brand of Baking Tin. They appear to be very nice baking tins, and they look greyish or maybe a pewter tone. We're going by the picture, because the Baking Tin's product data says they have no color. 

Are they invisible, like Wonder Woman's plane? Or is it just that there were no associated color attributes for these products, because the baking tin's product data wasn't structured well? 

What if you were shopping for a certain color of cookware, for a gift? Think these baking tins would come up in your search?

If you think we wrote this post because we could then put a picture of a cat in it, and cat pictures are really popular, you are only partly right. Because as popular as cat pictures have become, shoppers reviewing product data online has become even bigger.

We might have to just make a template of this post so we can change the underlined words and then publish it for any industry: shoppers are going online to research for products in the pet industry. That's because more and more shoppers in the pet industry have very specific product details - demands that MUST BE MET - before a purchase is made.

There's absolutely no doubt that small business owners today need as many tips and advantages as they can get. Whereas the internet will take all comers and entertain any vendor who can put up a website, it also severely punishes those who don't understand how to compete and market on the web.

SO, we're all about this article, which gives some tips and tricks for small businesses...mostly. Like 80%. Because tip Number 5 says, "Reduce Your Reliance on Search Engines."

Ummmm, ok.

Can I just have five minutes of your time? 

That used to be the "hook" phrase for most salepeople, back when five minutes was a little bit of time. Today, with the microwave cooking your food while you read and delete emails on your phone while you catch the latest sports headlines on a crawl underneath a sports anchor giving last night's scores...five minutes is an ETERNITY. How many tweets could you tweet in five minutes?

This article agrees. If your elevator pitch isn't tweetable, then your audience just won't hear it. Today's media consumers just don't have the time. 

So...drum roll...introducing Ezeeguides!

Ezeeguides asks shoppers simple questions and then, based on answers received, uses patented technology to guide them to the right products.

As mentioned before, no one structures and parses product data like Edgenet - which explains why no one can do what we do when it comes to guided selling. 

We've been telling you for years that better, highly structured data results in a bigger bottom line. Better data reduces inefficiencies, as indicated in an IBM study showing that companies lose an average of 8.2 million dollars annually from data collection issues.

And that's just data collection, not dissemination. One of our partners indicated that a supplier in their industry had to create between 50-100 data sets for 50-100 distributors.

We're under 30 days until Google officially, permanently changes its Google Shopping to a pay-for-play model. For those of you who are still figuring Google will reverse course on its decision, take a peek at Google's earnings ever since it has started shifting to the pay-for-play model. They're not going back, folks.

Experts have already begun to study, experiment and opine on how the new Google Shopping world will work. Rick Backus, the CEO and Co-Founder of CPC Strategy, a comparison shopping engine management company, has a lot of insight on how things will work - and how businesses can succeed.

In a discussion about feed optimization, Backus commented, "In reality the most difficult part of feed optimization is the categorization. And so, depending on how many categories the retailer has, in some instances they have 500, 600, 700 categories and the shopping engines don’t do the best job of categorizing the feeds unless you’re dictating to them what the proper category is."

When it comes to structuring data into categories, no one in the world can duplicate the work done by the experts at Edgenet. We know the difference between a bunch of information and a bunch of information structured so that it can be selected, parsed and compared.

In the same interview, Backus describes a data quality scoring system that sounds VERY FAMILIAR to us at Edgenet: "For major hypothetical example: Google says “we’re not going to show any PLAs for a retailer with a data feed quality score below 75.” And your retailer has a 72. Which would mean then they are not eligible for PLAs as the quality of the feeds isn’t high enough to show to their users independent of bids."

Edgenet's Ezeedata collects, then scores product data. Ezeedata has built-in processes that will optimize the product data, along with intuitive prompts for users to improve their score. Once the data receives a score of 75 or higher, it's considered "certified" and we will then deliver it to our partners like Google and Bing.

Coincidence? Perhaps. But the fact that a forward-thinking expert like Backus is thinking like the experts at Edgenet is not really surprising. It's just further proof that Edgenet has built the product data solution for this moment.

Most of us suffer from a bit of the "So What?" syndrome - the mindset that causes emails, dishes, or voicemails to stack up. The syndrome gets worse when it comes to change. Think of how many of your Facebook friends grouse about minute changes to Facebook. Often, we are dragged kicking and screaming to change.

On May 31, Google announced changes to its Google Shopping which will require any merchant who wants their products visible to submit a feed of information to Google. And the information you submit better match what's on your website.

Even before the product is rolled out, some members of the jury are returning a verdict.

On May 31, Google announced massive changes to Google Shopping, which are scheduled to take effect completely by October 1. Changes have already begun , and as experts begin to understand what's coming, some are worried about how retailers will react. Blogger Andrew Davis details "Why The New Google Shopping S*cks For E-Merchants."

Take it from us - Davis is right when he expresses concerns about a general, industry-wide ignorance to the importance of product data. We've been on our soap box a while, and even though we see the overwhelming evidence that Ezeedata's a game changer for data quality - and earnings - we have continued to witness businesses that don't see value in high quality product data.

Until now.

Many of us who remember the old days of searching for products online - like two weeks ago - will recall that typing in a general term at Google.com would yield a smattering of results that you had to parse through.

Google realized that's just plain bad business - and it breaks one of its principal rules: be relevant.

So, if you typed in "tent" at Google.com in May, you'd get some AdWords ads, and some listings. CPCStrategy.com is reporting that today, you'll see something like this:

(note: we tried and did not get this result, but that would be normal for Google, as it experiments with its new interface)

Even though the changes are massive, there's no need for panic. Google may be a giant, but it's no Godzilla.

By now, most savvy retailers - and even a few of the late adopters - have realized that Google has changed online retail with its announced changes to move to a pay-for-play model. Here are a few details you might not have realized.

In its latest video, Edgenet gives examples of how Ezeedata, its data feed optimization tool, changes how products appear on the internet. In example after example, more and higher-quality data was provided for shoppers. Sometimes you just need to see the difference to understand how better product data will result in better branding and increased sales.

As more consumers turn to mobile devices for everyday activities, some merchants are skipping building a website suited for mobile, and instead working to ensure their products are optimized for mobile devices. So, even if you can't make your website practical and pretty for mobile, you can definitely make your inventory ready for mobile shoppers.

This article from ecommercebytes.com indicates that 65.2% of merchants do not have a mobile website - but mentions that 60% are willing to optimize their online product listings for mobile shoppers.

It's a point we've made over and over at this blog, because, frankly, it's the point that every business is interested in: the bottom line.

Yeah, that point.

Edgenet's Peter Montross and Craig Cervenka are featured in the latest episode of "Edgenet Trends," and they're talking about the demanding world of product data feeds, product data management, and meeting the ever-changing target set by consumers and retailers.

In 2000, no one would have cared too much about how many ounces your travel-size shampoo was. By the end of 2001, laws had changed, and 3.5 ounce bottles were necessary. Does your car have an ipod dock or interface? Some people are making buying decisions based on whether they can play their music while driving.