StrikeIron Survey Confirms Need for eCommerce Sites to Improve Data Quality
Significant areas of improvement available for automating
address and email verification as well as integrating tax data into online
systems
Research Triangle Park, NC – November 6, 2007 – StrikeIron Inc., the leading
provider of Data as a Service, today announced the results of a survey
conducted during the Online Market World Conference recently held in San
Francisco. Online Market World drew over 3,000 registrants to examine the
critical issues spanning the complete eCommerce lifecycle and attracted many
big name retailers, B2B marketers as well as online-only sellers.
The Data Warehousing Institute (TDWI), the leading provider of in-depth
education and research in the data warehousing and business intelligence
industries, estimates current data quality problems cost U.S. businesses more
than $600 billion a year.
“Data Quality is more than updating records in a database. It’s about optimizing
business processes and making the sales process more efficient resulting in a
decrease in spending and improving the connection with their customers
throughout the sales cycle,” said Bob Brauer, President and CEO of StrikeIron.
“There is a significant and untapped global market for more effective and
affordable ways to maintain quality data within eCommerce systems.”
StrikeIron designed the survey to identify whether the latest data quality and
business intelligence data services available on the market were being utilized
by online retailers. Respondents were asked if they currently verified critical
customer data points such as age, address, email, and credit information. In
addition participants were asked if they programmatically accessed tax data for
eCommerce shopping carts as well as whether they had future plans to add data
quality services to their Web site or shopping cart. Several key trends were
discovered including:
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Less than 50 percent of respondents answered “Yes” to verifying age, address,
email or credit card information. Inaccurate addresses can result in increased
shipping costs, incorrect customer communications and increased fraud.
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Only 12 percent of respondents currently access real-time sales and use tax
data information real-time within the shopping cart. If not accessed
programmatically, these tax tables must be downloaded monthly, uploaded to a
local server and then maintained internally.
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Additional opportunities also exist for the 43 percent of respondents who did
verify addresses during the sales transaction process to append valuable
intelligence to customer and prospect records as they are collected. Critical
business intelligence help companies get an instant profile of a customer or
prospect to better understand who is buying, improve the sales process and
increase cross-selling and up selling potential.
Just like their enterprise counterparts, on-line companies are continually
optimizing for converting leads to sales. At the heart of that effort is the
quality of the customer information used throughout the sales process. The
real-time nature of the on-line transaction is ideal for real-time verification
and enhancement of data to improve the customer experience and decrease cost.
Major areas for improvement are:
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Reduce potential fraud
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Put clean data in the data base for future marketing efforts
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Add postal information to reduce shipping errors
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Append valuable information about B2B customers including; annual sales, key
executives, and check credit
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Make sure sales tax data is up to date
About StrikeIron
StrikeIron is the leader in providing innovative solutions for delivering data over
the emerging Internet. The company’s innovative Web Services Catalog provides
a technology platform, micro-transaction management and a consistent interface across
many XML-based Web services from multiple, diverse sources. This allows business
users, application developers and enterprise IT professionals to customize and integrate
external data sources and additional external functionality into enterprise, Web,
and composite applications. Currently, StrikeIron provides over 100 live data sources
and business functions from organizations such as Cortera, Gale, MapQuest,
Midnight Trader, Tax Data Systems, and Zacks.
StrikeIron also offers IronCloud™, the only comprehensive Web services delivery
platform that opens up new channels for data distribution and consumption through
Web Services. Enterprises of all sizes can now reduce the cost and complexity of
managing the challenges of data distribution which include leveraging an existing
external hardware and software architecture, controlling and metering access and
usage, external monitoring for 24x7 reliability, full usage analytics, as well as
multiple authentication scenarios and instead concentrate their focus on making
information easier for partners, customers, and distributed business units to access
and use. StrikeIron delivers value to over 1,500 customers and partners such as
Avaya, BEA, Delivery.com, IBM, Honda Europe, Siemens, Nike, Swarovski,
ShoeBuy, and Exclusive Resorts. For more information, visit
www.strikeiron.com.
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