Example of how Data Quality issues can ripple through a service and reduce the quality of the user experience: the Amazon case revisited
In a previous post we discussed Data Quality issues in Amazons product catalog. We showed the details of how those Data Quality issues can make it for Consumers difficult to find the products that they are interested in. As a consequence of the low Data Quality it is “easy” to pay on Amazon for exactly the same product $20 too much. But there is more that can be demonstrated with this concrete case: See below how the identified Data Quality issue ripples through Amazons service and continues to reduce the shopping experience.
The Amazon product catalog contains product items not only once but several times( for more details see this previous post). This is a problem for Shoppers because it makes it more difficult to find the best price for a product (you have to search in multiple ways to be sure to be more sure that you found all appearances that exist for one and the same product on Amazon). It also makes it harder to gather all the valuable customer feedback for a specific product from all those redundant entries in the Amazon product catalog.
The new screen shot below shows now concretely how the Data Quality issue is causing over time additional side effects on Amazon. Please look at the product recommendation (highlighted in the orange box). This is a value adding service that Amazon is providing to every customer and because of it I found in the past often products that were also worth buying.
But this concrete recommendation in the context of the USB hub is for me as a shopper useless. Not only is Amazon recommending to buy two times the same product (because of the Data Quality issue the Amazon system is not able to recognize that these two suggested products are the same) but one of them is even more expensive than the other. If I would buy two of the those USB hubs the better choice would be obviously to buy two of the hubs listed on the current product page (and not from the recommended). That would cost me together only $60 and not $62.99 as Amazon is suggesting in its “recommendation”.
Closing comment:
The discussed case of the USB hub on Amazon is demonstrating perfectly how Data Quality issues can ripple step by step through a whole service and reduce the quality and the value of this service in multiple ways. Let us state the obvious: Data is the most important ingredient of today’s information services. The old rule is still valid: Garbage in – Garbage out. Therefore we would like to give the following good advice to all service providers:
Be serious about fixing your Data Quality issues so that you are also able to deliver to your Customers the service that you intend to deliver.
If you are interested in a broader coverage of Data Quality issues and their impact we would like to recommend http://www.iqtrainwrecks.com/ . Thank you for reading and commenting our line of reasoning.
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Januar 20th, 2008 at 12:06 pm and is filed under Issues explained. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.
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