You’re reviewing the latest performance report for your online sales, and something feels off. You can’t figure out why sales numbers are lower than expected. Customers are complaining to support that an item they ordered was listed as “in stock” but later canceled because it wasn’t available. Meanwhile, your operations team finds discrepancies between inventory in the warehouse and what’s showing on your Shopify storefront.
Sound familiar? This is a reality that can sneak up on you. Minor discrepancies become significant revenue and margin hits.
For many businesses selling online (whether through direct channels, marketplaces, or wholesale), data silos are often the hidden culprit behind costly mistakes. When systems like your ERP, digital storefront, and inventory management tools operate in isolation, it creates communication gaps. And those gaps lead to operational errors, poor customer experiences, and lost revenue.
The Costly Reality of Disconnected Systems and Data
One of our clients, a company selling through multiple digital platforms, had their online storefront connected to their ERP, but that connection was incomplete.
Their online sales page displayed the internal cost of a product and not its external, customer-facing cost. Imagine listing a product for $15.99, only to charge $59.99 at checkout! Confused and unhappy customers? Absolutely.
In another case, our client’s inventory data wasn’t syncing between systems. Shopify showed items as “in stock” when their ERP revealed they were sold out. Customers placed orders for products that weren’t available, forcing the team to issue refunds and deal with irate buyers, which increased support costs and damaged customer trust. Whether selling direct to customers, or managing wholesale orders, these errors create costly inefficiencies and lost revenue.
In our experience, these issues are always symptoms of siloed data environments which creates additional problems as manual data entry is required to keep systems updated.
If your team is inputting product details into multiple systems, even the smallest typo can snowball into a big issue. For example, if an SKU is mistyped or not standardized, your inventory counts won’t match across platforms. This leads to overstocking in one warehouse, stockouts in another, and inaccurate reporting that skews decision-making.
Without proper unification, teams waste countless hours reconciling discrepancies. This puts an increased burden on people as they try to manually align inventory and pricing issues by using complex spreadsheets – all while customers and stakeholders demand answers.
The Solution: Data Unification
We’ve seen the impact of data unification firsthand. By integrating siloed systems and creating a single source of truth, we help businesses overcome these challenges and operate with confidence.
Here’s how:
- Standardized SKUs:
Messy SKUs are a common issue across industries. In retail, variants like size or color are often miskeyed or mismatched with parent products. While in manufacturing or distribution, different product codes across supply chain systems can cause fulfillment delays. Our data unification tools ensure consistent SKU creation and maintenance, flagging errors before they cause downstream problems. - Reliable Inventory Management:
Imagine having inventory that syncs perfectly across your ERP and Shopify storefront. With unified data, your store always reflects accurate stock levels, preventing overselling and improving the customer experience. - Error Detection and Prevention:
By automatically comparing data across systems, we catch discrepancies like reversed pricing fields or incomplete product descriptions. This proactive approach eliminates the need for reactive fixes and reduces the risk of costly mistakes. - Real-Time Updates:
Unification allows for seamless communication between systems, ensuring that updates to pricing, inventory, or customer data are instantly reflected everywhere. This keeps your operations running smoothly and your customers happy.
What Success Looks Like
Let’s revisit our earlier examples. After implementing a unified data solution, the client with mismatched pricing fields saw immediate improvements. Their pricing data was validated at data entry, ensuring internal costs and external prices were always accurate and correctly displayed. Customer complaints dropped, and trust in the brand was restored.
A centralized unification of essential data approach brought clarity and control to the company struggling with inventory sync issues. Their Shopify storefront and ERP now communicate seamlessly, ensuring stock levels are always accurate and updated in real-time across the board. This eliminated the dreaded “out-of-stock after purchase” emails, boosting sales and the customer experience.
But beyond resolving specific pain points, unification freed these businesses from the endless cycle of manual data reconciliation. Their teams could focus on strategy and growth instead of firefighting operational errors.
Let’s Fix This Together
Data silos create operational headaches and stifle your business’s ability to grow and adapt. Having clean, reliable, and connected data has become a competitive advantage in today’s fast-paced e-commerce landscape.
At Datagence, we help businesses selling online break away from the limitations of siloed data. Our service-first approach means you get expert-driven solutions tailored to your unique challenges, without the complexity and costs of expensive platform purchases and additional subscription fees. The work gets done, your data stays clean, and your systems stay connected—all without adding another tool to your tech stack.
Don’t let data silos hold your business back.
We are experienced in unifying your systems, streamlining operations, and creating the seamless customer journey your brand deserves.
Click here to talk with a data unification and quality expert.
