B2B eCommerce Launches Slip on Product Data with Matt Christensen of DDS

Yeah.

That's awesome.

Take us back before ChatGPT, way back be- 20...

Well, you, I think you started in two...

Or late 2010s, 2008, something like that.

What was it like launching a catalog then compared to now?

There's still some of the same issues.

I, I think when we, we look at our customers, uh, they're large catalogs.

You know, the, the smallest customer is probably 10, 20,000 SKUs.

Largest customer is probably close to 15 million.

So getting that data from hundreds or thousands or tens of thousands of manufacturers, the...

In North America, the data's all over the place.

It's, if you look at every one of those manufacturers, every manufacturer stores it differently.

They call different parts of the data different things.

They normalize differently or dort, or don't normalize.

And so it's, it's still all over the place.

That, that problem has not really changed.

I think what, what has changed is some of the bigger software companies, uh, I'd say within the last two years, you, you see your recognizable names like Shopify, BigCommerce, a lot of the big PIM companies, Shopware.

We're, we're talking about Shopware.

We, this is makeup from the Shoptoberfest.

They're, they're pushing the industries ahead much faster than we- we've seen in the past.

So I think that's one of the major changes we've seen, and it's, it's much needed.

Some of the industries that we're in, in the B2B kind of wholesale, electrical, plumbing, HVAC, industrial supply, they're, they're just not as, I'd say, technologically mature as we see in B2C and retail space.

So we, we need more of the software companies to come in and help and just, just make things easier for everyone.

So yeah, the, the ChatGPT, the AI stuff for us allows us to quickly enrich the data, normalize the data, create custom specs for any of our customers that is very repeatable, where before Could have been a little manual.