The (underestimated) role of product data for winning online retail

Sammanfattning: As E-commerce continues to take market share from traditional brick and mortar businesses, there are few choices left for managers apart from migrating their sales online. While the topic of online adoption has been studied extensively, this thesis attempts to investigate one of the major drivers of complexity within the industry - the role of structured product data. The study was performed on a major Nordic online retailer, and identified a set of six guiding propositions on the topic of structured product data in e-commerce from interviews with industry professionals. Contemporary data science literature contributes to the body of evidence suggesting a strategically prioritized focus on creating and maintaining structured product data is the way of the future for ecommerce, aligning with much of the interview results. Furthermore, the propositions were thoroughly examined through multiple linear regression analysis on data from the same firm. The study gives empirical support for significant positive impact on most studied metrics from having structured product data available on the website as well as within the internal systems, with slight discrepancies across product categories.