Why warehouses run at 99.9% and product data does not | Ep. 1

Episode 1 - Data Problem - Transcript

Welcome to Data Versus Commerce, where we explore the messy middle between database and doorstep. I'm Matt Johnson. And I'm Floyd Blaikie. Let's dig in

Floyd: Let's go. What's up, Matt?

Matt: What's up, Floyd?

Floyd: It's podcast time.

Matt: It is, it is. I'm excited to kick this off with you. Let's do it.

Floyd: Tell me about yourself, Matt. It's like a job interview. Who are you?

Matt: Nobody knows who we are, right? Good point. Yeah, for our new listeners: I'm Matt Johnson. I'm the head of distribution and manufacturing here at Pivotree, and I've spent my entire career working in digital commerce, B2B e-commerce in particular, primarily for distributors and manufacturers. I help them solve the issues around systems, processes, teamwork, and technology, and I emphasize the importance of product data, which has something to do with the name of our show.

That's me, and hopefully you'll get to know me a little more as we go along. Excited to be here.

Floyd: Me too, I'm really excited. I'm Floyd Blaikie. I'm the head of marketing at Pivotree. I joined the team fairly recently, in January 2026, but I've spent my career largely in manufacturing marketing, with a bit of broadcast before that as well. So I'm excited for both halves of my career to come together here as we kick off Data Versus Commerce.

Now I'm going to pull back the curtain. Matt, when we started working on this podcast concept, you didn't like the name. What's up with that?

Matt: It was so funny. You'd been working hard on the theme and the name for the show, and when you revealed it, I said, "Horrible. Horrible. I don't get it." Because in my black-and-white way of thinking, I thought, "Data versus commerce? Wait a second, commerce is data."

But I've changed my tune. I'm starting to really understand what we're talking about, and it's real. There's a conflict between the data we have and the commerce experience we need across the industries we serve, and I see it every day.

Data teams are some of the most underappreciated, understaffed, under-resourced people in digital commerce. And the customer experience relies on clean data getting where it needs to go. So these things have to be united. That's the goal.

The goal is frictionless commerce, with data living where it needs to live. But there's a gap. There's a conflict. Data and commerce aren't talking to each other, and that's the conversation, right, Floyd? I love it now.

Floyd: It's not a knockdown fight, we're not pitting one against the other. Think of it more like couples therapy, to be literal. Data and commerce have a really important relationship. Sometimes they forget how to communicate, and we're going to talk about how that happens and why.

That's the intro I had in my head, which I was going to use to lead into the fact that, Matt, I actually invented this podcast. It's fake, because I wanted to ask you a question and you're really hard to pin down: it's all about my dishwasher. Is that okay with you?

Matt: Yeah, let's go.

Floyd: It's a fake podcast so I can get some tech support. My dishwasher broke, which really sucks for me because I've got kids, I like to eat lunch, and I really don't like doing dishes in the sink. It stopped working. I hit the button, the "go" one. I'm not very dishwasher-technical. It didn't make water, and a dishwasher is supposed to make water. So I googled it and found that I needed a new pump.

I did all my research. I looked up the model number, got all the manufacturer details. It was the right voltage, the right dimensions, and it said it was in stock and would ship fast, so I thought, "Sweet."

I don't want to do a single additional dish with my hands, that's not what these are for. So I bought it, and I paid twenty-five extra dollars to have it come overnight. Here's what happened: it took three days to actually show up, so I'd already gotten pruny fingers, not happy about that. Then when I tried to install it, the connector needed four pins.

What they sent me had three pins. It didn't go together. So I paid over a hundred and fifty dollars for the part and rush shipping that didn't even happen, and now it shows up and, even though it's supposedly the right part from the right manufacturer, the pins don't connect. So who can I blame for this, Matt? I need to send an angry email somewhere. You have to tell me.

Matt: Well, obviously the customer service team takes the brunt of your frustration first, that's usually what happens. The sales org feels it first. That sucks. I hate washing dishes by hand too.

You're so conditioned to think you're going to get something the next day. It doesn't always work out like that.

Floyd: And the right thing.

Matt: And the right thing, exactly. So let's diagnose this together. I suspect that when you searched for that part, it came up and looked like the right part.

You searched for the part number or the brand, and it looked like the right thing. But you don't really know, you're not a contractor, so you can't tell.

Floyd: I'm not, no.

Matt: It's not like you've installed twenty-five of these things over the last three months, so you're trusting the data on that product detail page.

Yeah, I really was. So it starts there. That product information had an error in it, and somehow it made it online. And that's a problem, because if you got a four-prong part when you should've gotten a three-prong part, then the person who needed the four-prong part probably got the three-prong one.

Floyd: I ended up googling it more because I wanted to know how I made this mistake, and it turns out that the year mine was manufactured, they switched from three pins to four partway through the year, but the model number stayed the same.

So how could I have avoided this trap? What could someone have done differently so I'm not mad and dishwasher-less? How does that get fixed?

Matt: This is the problem that every large parts dealer, manufacturer, or distributor struggles with. What's happening, Floyd, is that you may not realize it because you're just trying to get something you need, but they're managing hundreds of supplier data feeds and hundreds of thousands of different parts and SKUs.

What usually happens is product data comes in from the supplier, gets loaded to the website, and everybody assumes, "Great, that's done." What they don't do is actively update their product catalog afterward. This is pretty typical. Most distributors and parts dealers are basically operating in firefighting mode.

It's a fire: you let customer service know about your frustration, and what happens is that person thinks, "It's not my fault, tell the website team what happened," and now they go fix it.

But that's reaction mode. It's the result of operating reactively instead of proactively. What they should have had was a system that would flag and refresh product data coming from their suppliers, which would have let them catch the serial number change ahead of time.

Unfortunately, you're dealing with so many parts that these things get missed.

Floyd: So many of them, yeah.

Matt: Right, and so the customer service person blames the product team, but the product team probably blames a platform or a supplier, and the blame ultimately gets shifted downstream.

But really, it should lie with commerce leadership, because there was no gate in place to prevent outdated data from going live for a customer to purchase.

Floyd: I can see how easily that would happen. I bought it from a distributor, not directly from the manufacturer's site (I'm not giving anyone a free plug here). So what you're saying is that the data was correct back in May, but by the time I looked the next May, the part had changed and nobody caught it, because no one's job is to keep it up to date until a problem surfaces and they go fix it. Is that what's going on?

Matt: Yeah, that's exactly right. There has to be a process that starts at the very top of what we call the digital supply chain. The manufacturer is usually doing their job, not always, sometimes that's the problem too. But what they typically do is maintain a PIM, or a data system, connected to their distributors or resellers, and they put feeds into it. A feed is an updated list of product information that gets integrated, or more often, downloaded by the distributor and then uploaded into the distributor's system so they can update the product information online.

So what happens if there's a broken pipe here? The pipe between the manufacturer's feed and the distributor's website breaks down, whether from a breakdown in process, governance, or just the translation of that product data into the distributor's commerce system.

Floyd: This happened to me once, and I'm just one person with one dishwasher. But if this is happening even half a percent of the time, that's a lot of customers getting the wrong part, or businesses getting a truckload of the wrong part. How often is this happening, and what kind of impact does it have on the people selling these products?

Matt: Think about it from a contractor's perspective. Say they're on-site with a customer who isn't as DIY as you are, Floyd, and they've hired a contractor to fix their dishwasher. That contractor diagnoses the problem, identifies the part they need, and wants to save time, because they have to get to the next appointment. So they pull up the website, order the part, it arrives wrong, and the customer is furious.

That customer isn't thinking about the digital supply chain, they're thinking, "My contractor is bad at their job." So what does that contractor do next time? They don't go back to the website, they've lost trust in it.

Floyd: I can believe that.

Matt: They'll call and verify instead. They'll find a salesperson at that distributor and say, "This is what I'm looking for, and just in case there's any confusion, here's a picture of what I need."

Floyd: And that takes up someone else's time on the distributor's end. Now there's a salesperson basically helping someone find the right part in the right aisle. That can't be a great use of their time.

Matt: Exactly, and honestly, it defeats the whole purpose. Every distributor wants their website to let customers self-serve, so their sales team can be more efficient and strategic. When this happens, they've basically shot themselves in the foot.

Unfortunately, it happens all too often, which is why, at least in my industry, we see only ten to fifteen percent of total revenue going through e-commerce channels. That's way behind where it should be, and it's because of this kind of thing. Customers don't trust it.

Floyd: Now I can see why. So when the wrong thing shows up, whether it's a dishwasher part or a shirt in the wrong color, I used to assume something got messed up at the warehouse, like someone grabbed the wrong item, or a pick-and-pack robot made a mistake.

But the mistake is happening further upstream, at the data layer. It's not a physical problem, it's a problem that exists on a computer somewhere. I wonder how many people think about it that way instead of just seeing the wrong physical product show up on their doorstep.

Matt: A hundred percent. We often assume it's a warehouse or logistics issue, but most of the time these distributors, manufacturers, and retailers are 99.9 percent accurate when it comes to moving physical product. That's what they're good at. Unfortunately, they're not always as efficient at moving and maintaining product data.

They don't take care of it as well as they take care of the warehouse. So it's often a part number, product specification, or attribute that's wrong or missing that ends up being the roadblock in the customer's journey and experience.

Floyd: Okay, so how do we fix it? How do I get the correct dishwasher part next time?

Matt: Let's fix it. I've thought about this because I like listening to a lot of health podcasts. I'm not very good at physical fitness, but I try to know as much as I can about it. When I listen to these experts talk about the problems people have, it always comes down to habits and mindset.

We could easily point fingers at platforms, team members, or say we don't have enough staff, but at the end of the day, it comes back to the concept of data governance. That can mean a lot of things, but essentially it means having a disciplined process with gates built in that prevent these kinds of errors from happening in the first place.

A lot of teams operate reactively, in task mode: "I need to update the supplier feed, I need to enrich this product category, I need to fix or remove these products." But they should really be thinking about it as a lifecycle, a continuous process.

That depends on a couple of things. You have to be able to define the process first, then automate it, because this is a perennially understaffed role in most organizations. There simply aren't enough people to do the job well.

So how do you automate it? How can you use AI to make sure your manufacturer's data feed is automatically updating your PIM, flowing through a governance process where people spot-check the human work, and then transform that data using better technology and workflows so it displays accurately for the customer? It may be easier than it sounds, but it always comes back to process, and that's habit. You have to build the muscle to make it routine.

Floyd: And if you want to keep comparing it to personal fitness, you can't go to the gym once and be shredded for life. This is something you have to keep doing, getting feedback, and getting better and better. I think that's a perspective we can dig into a lot more.

My one complaint, Matt, is that you still haven't told me why I didn't get my overnight shipping. Can you speak to that, please?

Matt: Oof, that's a whole other thing. I think we'll have to tackle that on the next one.

Floyd: Okay, fine. Keep me in suspense, me and my broken dishwasher.

Matt: All right.

Floyd: Thanks, Matt.

Thanks for tuning in to this episode of Data Versus Commerce. New episodes drop weekly, so if you're responsible for any part of how products get from a database to a doorstep, subscribe now on Apple, Spotify, or wherever you listen.