Company news

Digitec Galaxus is allowing customers to edit product data

4.1.2024

Translation: Patrik Stainbrook

Wikipedia and Digitec Galaxus are moving closer together, at least in one respect. Customers can now update incorrect or missing product data themselves.

With a range of over 6.3 million products, it isn’t always easy to keep track of everything. Every month, thousands of old products are removed from our shop, while a similar number of new ones are added. Unfortunately, some of the relevant product information is incomplete or missing altogether. This dilemma isn’t only familiar to the Community, but also to Digitec Galaxus. In addition to the many logics, algorithms, two scrum teams and the 50-strong Product Content Development Team (PCD team), which deals exclusively with product data, the Community can now also manage product information. The idea was born at Hackfest 2022. Around a year later, the service is now live.

Product data as the eye of the needle

Accurate product data is a key element for finding, filtering and sorting products. Keeping this up to date and correct with a rapidly growing product range is no easy task. After all, our suppliers provide the product data in a wide variety of ways. Each supplier uses different designations, units and formats. We compare data with each other and convert it into a consistent layout. «We work with thousands of different suppliers who provide us with millions of different pieces of data,» says Product Owner Zara Hegemann.

A part of the development team behind the new feature.

Example: different smartphone suppliers refer to «colour» in different ways. We, in turn, save colours in our system as «Colour», then «Exact colour description». A smartphone could therefore belong to the black «colour» group, but the exact colour description is obsidian. We have to assign all this data accordingly in our system. Most of it happens automatically, and the PCD team handles anything that needs a human touch. The Community can now also go in and correct any missing or incomplete data.

Swarm intelligence like Wikipedia

Our Community has long expressed its desire to maintain product data itself. Community member Btschaegg also spoke out about this a year ago:

1.) Incorrect specifications should be able to be «flagged». 2.) Unrecorded specification details should be able to be suggested by a process.

Btschaegg

The wiki system is based on the principle that voluntary visitors to a website will maintain its content. Wikipedia is probably the best-known website based on this structure. Instead of a company or paid authors, users are behind the contributions.

From now on, Digitec Galaxus users who’re logged in and have reached at least level 2 can also enter product data themselves. Just like Wikipedia. The two development teams Isotopes and Heisenberg, led by Product Owner Zara Hegemann and Product Owner Pier-Luca Natali, have joined forces for this project as the Heisentopes team. Both teams developed and intensively tested this unique feature over the past few months.

Just click on «Edit specifications» to access the editor and suggest changes.

«Users who have made the correction see their suggested changes immediately,» says Zara. This is psychologically motivating and really beneficial. In a product comparison, for example, properties entered are immediately visible and applicable to everyone. This means that all visitors to the online shop immediately benefit from the suggestions, marked with a note. The information disappears as soon as we’ve checked the request and found it to be correct. There’s an exception for free text entries. Here, a check is always first carried out before the change is displayed to everyone. Zara explains it this way: «In the initial phase, we want to have control and gain early experience of the quality of proposals. In a later step, changes will be checked and approved without detours from the PCD team thanks to various parameters, logics, Community votes and artificial intelligence.»

Our ambition is to provide high-quality product data. One of the many measures we’re implementing is utilising the extensive expertise of our Community and allowing them to contribute.

Product data maintenance

What do you think of the new feature, community product data maintenance?

What do you mean, I don't work for you
26%
I'm just here to shop and read reports
5%
Cool thing, I like to contribute by improving product data when I notice something
60%
No idea – I'm just interested in what others have clicked on
8%

The competition has ended.

328 people like this article

Manuel Wenk

Communications Manager

Manuel.Wenk@digitecgalaxus.ch

As a Multimedia Producer, preparing multimedia content and knowing about cutting-edge technology is my business. My main focus at digitec is producing videos. I can’t wait to try out new products such as cameras, drones or smartphones as soon as they’re launched. This is where being at the source comes in rather handy. When I’m not working, I’m probably skiing, biking or hiking – the mountains are my place to be.

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