Product data enrichment
Product data enrichment is the work of adding what a product record is missing, such as its specifications, images and description, from sources you can check.
- Product enrichment
- Product content enrichment
What it means
Product data enrichment takes an incomplete product record and adds what it lacks, so the product can be found, filtered, compared and bought. It covers four kinds of data: identity (the real name, brand, GTIN and MPN), specifications, categorisation, and content such as images and copy.
Most of what a supplier leaves out has already been published, on the manufacturer’s page, in a datasheet or on another retailer’s listing. Finding the page is the easy half. Proving that it shows the same product is the hard half, because a value copied from the wrong page looks finished.
It goes hand in hand with data cleansing, which fixes the values already there. Cleansing comes first, because you cannot tell what is missing until what is present means the same thing everywhere. Every value added should keep a link to its source.
Think of it like this
Completing a family tree is the same work. Each missing date comes from a parish register or a census, with the record noted beside it so anyone can check.
For example
A supplier row for a fridge freezer arrives as NX-4821-W, with no name, brand or capacity and an energy rating of A++. Enriched, it reads 60cm fridge freezer, Brackmore, 331 L. Its rating is looked up again rather than converted, because fridges moved to a new A to G label on 1 March 2021.1
Why it matters
A shopper can only filter on values that are in your data, and a blank cell gives AI shopping assistants nothing to quote. Google says products with missing or incorrect GTINs “may have limited visibility”.2 OpenAI’s product feed specification for ChatGPT requires a brand and a factual description for every item.3
Not to be confused with
Enrichment is not data cleansing. Cleansing corrects what is already in the file, such as a colour spelt three ways, while enrichment adds what was never there, such as a missing capacity.
Sources
- NetRegs (SEPA and NIEA). Energy labelling requirements.
- Google Merchant Center Help. GTIN [gtin].
- OpenAI Developers. Agentic Commerce product feed specification: Products.