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?

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.

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.

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.

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.

A recent study by ClickIQ demonstrates how badly consumers want product information while shopping. ClickIQ polled consumer panel members who used their phone or mobile device to research products while shopping. 61% said they used the internet to research a particular product, far and away the most popular activity.

Many analysts have begun to throw their opinions in on Google's latest earnings miss - specifically the slowing in the search giant's core business (from 33% to 25% in Q4). This article in Business Insider theorizes that mobile search is far less profitable than standard search, and indicates that Amazon's rise might be taking a huge bite out of Google's success.

If Edgenet's success rode on organic search and Google's ability to rule the internet, Q4 of 2011 would have delivered us some sobering news.

We've been telling you for years that consumer behavior has shifted forever. We see it in studies like this one, which explain that impulse buying is dead. Challenging economic times, the rise of mobile devices being used as "data devices", and the increased demand for better images, videos and details have all combined to create a population clamoring for more.

We've recently stumbled across a study which proved our point. The study showed