Solving Headache-Inducing Data Management Challenges for E-Commerce

E-commerce companies exist to provide convenient and accessible shopping experiences to consumers worldwide. They play a crucial role in the modern economy, often bridging the gap between manufacturers and customers.

However, an e-commerce company’s ability to effectively serve customers and grow the business heavily depends on its organizational efficiency. Arguably, the most critical factor for success is the way the company collects, manages, and utilizes data. Data management directly impacts the capacity to drive sales, improve customer satisfaction, and achieve profitability.

Like any company, e-commerce websites need to effectively track their relationships with customers to better understand their industry and achieve their goals. But tracking is not as straightforward as it is for other companies. For example, B2B companies need only track contacts, companies, and deals. Their primary task is to ensure that these related records are clean, complete, consistent, and linked to other relevant records.

For e-commerce, the situation is far more complex. They must manage a diverse array of data points, including individual customers, products, orders, quantities, abandoned carts, and marketing campaigns that are likely to include thousands of ads across dozens of platforms—along with tracking inventory, returns, and customer service interactions. This diverse data doesn't fit neatly into the predefined CRM record types. To further complicate the issue, each e-commerce app will also have its own quirks and ways of integrating with CRM systems.

Ultimately, e-commerce companies end up facing a choice: Should they try to force the diverse data that they collect into the existing CRM record types in favor of simplicity, or use custom objects, complicating the use of their CRM across the whole company?

Let's dig deeper into some of the common data management challenges that e-commerce companies face when using popular CRM platforms.

Common Data Management Challenges for E-Commerce Companies

When implementing a CRM system, a key decision often involves whether to adapt existing structures such as contacts, companies, or deals—or to build out a more e-commerce-specific data architecture with custom fields. This choice has significant implications for data management and overall system functionality, as CRM features that are available for default record types may not be available for custom ones. However, trying to shove data into default record types that aren’t really applicable often creates many quirks and data issues. Then companies must address those issues, adding complexity across the business.

The challenges of this decision often do not become apparent until the CRM system is actively used, and by the time they surface it may be too late to make changes without a lot of effort and cost. For e-commerce companies, having clean, reliable data is critical for personalization, inventory management, and customer service.

Let's look at some of the common issues that e-commerce companies face when using CRMs:

• Customer data complexity: E-commerce companies deal with a high volume of individual customers rather than business accounts. Tracking purchase history, browsing behavior, preferences, and communication requires detailed and accurate data that many CRM systems are not natively designed to collect and store.
• Product catalog and inventory management: E-commerce businesses need to manage extensive product catalogs, including variants, pricing, and inventory levels, which traditional CRMs are not designed to handle.
• Order management: Tracking orders, including status updates, shipping information, and returns, adds another layer of complexity not typically found in B2B CRMs. Many companies resort to using the deals object or the equivalent in their CRM, which can work, but often provides limited functionality.
• Usage and activity tracking: Being able to recognize what products a visitor has viewed, what they have added to their cart, what they've removed form their cart, and where they abandoned checkout processes are all critical datapoints for E-commerce companies.
• Inventory management: Real-time tracking of inventory across multiple warehouses or drop-shipping partners is crucial for e-commerce but not typically a feature of standard CRMs.
• Returns and refunds: Managing returns, refunds, and exchanges is a significant part of e-commerce operations that needs to be tracked in the CRM, most of which do not offer this functionality as a default.
• Loyalty program management: Many e-commerce businesses run loyalty programs, which require tracking points, rewards, and redemptions. Running these through your CRM will require a third-party app or a custom-coded solution.
• Seasonal and promotional data management: e-commerce often deals with rapid changes in data during sales events or seasonal peaks, which can strain traditional CRM systems.
• Multiple integration complexities: e-commerce companies often rely on numerous third-party integrations to fill feature gaps in their CRM systems. These might include shopping cart platforms, payment gateways, email marketing tools, customer support software, and analytics platforms. While these integrations are necessary to create a comprehensive e-commerce ecosystem, they introduce many data management challenges.

ECommerce organizations face many technical issues when using popular CRM systems. These issues can profoundly impact their effectiveness and ability to succeed in their mission.

How These Issues Impact E-Commerce Companies

The data management issues faced by e-commerce companies can significantly impact their operations and effectiveness. Each individual data issue requires that the company identify it, devise a solution, and implement it across an entire database. That can take time. And while those issues go unresolved, companies feel the effects:

• Reduced customer engagement: Inaccurate or incomplete customer data can lead to ineffective communication and personalization, hurting the customer experience and reducing the likelihood of repeat purchases.
• Inefficient marketing efforts: Poor data management can result in uncoordinated marketing campaigns, duplication of efforts, and missed opportunities for customer segmentation and targeted promotions. Without reliable data, you cannot launch highly segmented and targeted campaigns.
• Inventory mismanagement: Inadequate tracking of inventory levels can lead to stockouts or overstock situations, impacting sales and increasing costs.
• Ineffective product management: Low-quality data can hinder the ability to track product performance, measure profitability, and make data-driven decisions for product offerings and pricing.
• Increased operational burden: Manual data entry and reconciliation due to poor quality data can increase operational workload, diverting resources from core business activities.
• Poor customer relationships: Inconsistent or outdated information can damage relationships with customers, affecting trust and loyalty to the brand.
• Missed cross-selling and upselling opportunities: Inefficient data management can lead to missed opportunities for increasing customer lifetime value through personalized recommendations.

Looking at that list, it's clear that data quality has an outsized impact on e-commerce companies' success. Poor data quality negatively impacts almost all corners of the organization.

But Insycle can help e-commerce companies solve their biggest CRM data management challenges, in bulk and automatically.

How Insycle Addresses E-Commerce CRM Data Management Challenges

Insycle offers a comprehensive suite of tools designed to tackle the unique data management challenges faced by e-commerce businesses. By integrating seamlessly with popular CRM and e-commerce platforms like HubSpot, Salesforce, and Pipedrive—Insycle bridges the gap between modern e-commerce companies and CRM systems that are primarily tailored for B2B applications.

Example 1: Track E-Commerce-Specific Data Quality Issues

The Customer Data Health Assessment is a cornerstone feature of Insycle, providing businesses with a daily automated audit of their customer databases. This tool is designed to identify common issues, and can be tailored with custom templates to track issues that are specific to e-commerce companies, such as:

• duplicate customer profiles
• inconsistent product categorization
• mismatched order and inventory data
• incomplete customer purchase histories

Default data issue categories tracked by Insycle’s Customer Data Health Assessment

The Customer Data Health Assessment scans your database nightly, identifying issues and serving as a daily data quality audit. 

For example, the assessment can be configured to track things such as contacts that are missing critical shipping address information or names for personalization. 

E-commerce companies can customize the scanner to focus on their specific data priorities, ensuring that critical issues are flagged promptly. This proactive approach to data management helps prevent small inconsistencies from snowballing into major problems that could impact customer experience or operational efficiency.

Example 2: Standardizing and Formatting Shipping Address and Phone Data

One of Insycle's key strengths is its ability to handle large-scale data operations efficiently. This is particularly valuable for e-commerce businesses dealing with extensive product catalogs and high customer volumes. Some examples of bulk operations include:

• standardizing product names and descriptions across multiple channels;
• updating pricing and inventory levels en masse;
• merging duplicate customer profiles while preserving histories;
• segmenting customers based on purchase behavior and engagement metrics; and
• bulk formatting and standardization of addresses and phone numbers

With Insycle, you can easily standardize and format any part of the address, by mapping terms: 

Additionally, Insycle offers pre-built functions for formatting certain aspects of the addresses, such as the State field, for both full state names and abbreviations. 

Now, you can ensure that you never have shipping issues with complete address standardization and policy adherence. Further, reporting on your customers is easier as well. 

Insycle also includes pre-built functions for formatting phone numbers in multiple popular formats. 

Insycle’s default functions for formatting and standardizing phone numbers in bulk

This ensures that you'll be able to utilize any phone integrations and automation that require a specific format, such as CallRail and other phone apps. 

Even better — all of these templates can be automated to run on a set schedule, so your customer data is standardized immediately after the record is created and before you begin communicating with them. 

Insycle's intuitive interface allows e-commerce teams to perform these complex operations without advanced technical skills. This democratization of data management empowers marketing, sales, and customer service teams to maintain data quality without constant reliance on IT resources.

Example 3: Improving Inventory Management With Accurate Data and Alerts

For e-commerce businesses, maintaining accurate inventory data is crucial to avoid overselling or missed sales opportunities. Insycle provides tools to alert you to issues as they arise and automatically deliver data to colleagues for human checks and approvals. With Insycle, you can:

• reconcile inventory counts across different systems;
• identify and correct discrepancies between orders and stock levels;
• standardize product SKUs and attributes for better tracking; and
• automate low-stock alerts based on sales velocity.

By maintaining high-quality inventory data, e-commerce companies can optimize their stock levels, reduce carrying costs, and improve customer satisfaction through accurate product availability information.

Revolutionizing E-Commerce Data Management

The unique challenges faced by e-commerce companies in managing their CRM and operational data require specialized solutions. Traditional CRM systems, often designed with B2B sales processes in mind, fall short in addressing the complexities of online retail data management.

Insycle bridges this gap by providing a robust set of tools specifically tailored to e-commerce needs. From handling high-volume customer data to managing complex product catalogs and order histories, Insycle empowers e-commerce businesses to maintain clean, accurate, and actionable data.

By implementing Insycle's solutions, online retailers can:

• enhance customer experiences through accurate, personalized interactions;
• optimize inventory management and reduce operational inefficiencies;
• improve marketing effectiveness with precise customer segmentation; and
• ensure data compliance and reduce risks associated with poor data quality.

Having a powerful ally like Insycle can be the difference between struggling with data chaos and leveraging information as a strategic asset. By taking control of their data management with Insycle, e-commerce companies can focus on what they do best: providing exceptional online shopping experiences and growing their business in an increasingly competitive landscape.