IMPROVING E-COMMERCE DATA QUALITY
even the smaller suppliers and retailers to effectively collect, manage and share their data,” says Charles Nicolson, VestaCentral CEO. “Our investment in R& D is unlocking new verticals in New Zealand and Australia as ‘bricks and mortar’ stores rush to move their inventory online and suppliers meet new global standards for data quality.”
Initially developed for timber and building materials, VestaCentral is being introduced in industries from FMCG and recreational sports to cosmetics and pharmaceuticals. The platform has already managed over one million SKUs worth of data from 1000 suppliers.
Global standards body GS1 and many international marketplaces are advocating for the adoption of a single, consistent data standard to reduce the costs and delays that arise from poor quality data. Inconsistent descriptions of a physical product and its ‘digital twin’ in an e-commerce store leads to poor customer experience, extra costs to reconcile and poses risks to product safety. For example, commercial drivers relying on the online information about a product’s weight may inadvertently overload their vehicle if this differs from the real weight of the physical product.
VESTA-CENTRAL, a cloud-based product data sharing platform for SMEs, has won a Callaghan Innovation R&D Growth Grant of up to $15 million over three years to improve the quality of the data that underpins e-commerce.
The platform detects and removes errors from product data and makes it easier to share, creating supply chain efficiencies across an entire industry.
The Albany company is targeting emerging technologies like blockchain and AI to prevent data duplication and errors in data between trading partners. This benefits suppliers with a wide product range and those who must comply with several different customer data standards, while offering retailers a single source of truth for their product information.
The platform automates moving the products of a traditional bricks and mortar store online, ‘stocking’ the digital shelves with the product pictures, pricing, descriptions and consumer information sourced directly from suppliers.
Vesta-Central makes this process faster and more accurate than using spreadsheets and manual data entry, with customers saying they’ve reduced the time spent filling their online shelves from 52 weeks to just a few hours a week over six weeks.
“High quality, error free product data is a source of competitive advantage in the digital economy and Vesta-Central enables