StrikeIron Inc., the leading provider of Data as a Service, today announced the results of a survey conducted during the Online Market World Conference recently held in San Francisco. Online Market World drew over 3,000 registrants to examine the critical issues spanning the complete eCommerce lifecycle and attracted many big name retailers, B2B marketers as well as online-only sellers.

The Data Warehousing Institute (TDWI), the leading provider of in-depth education and research in the data warehousing and business intelligence industries, estimates current data quality problems cost U.S. businesses more than $600 billion a year.

“Data Quality is more than updating records in a database. It’s about optimizing business processes and making the sales process more efficient resulting in a decrease in spending and improving the connection with their customers throughout the sales cycle,” said Bob Brauer, President and CEO of StrikeIron. “There is a significant and untapped global market for more effective and affordable ways to maintain quality data within eCommerce systems.”

StrikeIron designed the survey to identify whether the latest data quality and business intelligence data services available on the market were being utilized by online retailers. Respondents were asked if they currently verified critical customer data points such as age, address, email, and credit information. In addition participants were asked if they programmatically accessed tax data for eCommerce shopping carts as well as whether they had future plans to add data quality services to their Web site or shopping cart. Several key trends were discovered including:

• Less than 50 percent of respondents answered “Yes” to verifying age, address, email or credit card information. Inaccurate addresses can result in increased shipping costs, incorrect customer communications and increased fraud.
• Only 12 percent of respondents currently access real-time sales and use tax data information real-time within the shopping cart. If not accessed programmatically, these tax tables must be downloaded monthly, uploaded to a local server and then maintained internally.
• Additional opportunities also exist for the 43 percent of respondents who did verify addresses during the sales transaction process to append valuable intelligence to customer and prospect records as they are collected. Critical business intelligence help companies get an instant profile of a customer or prospect to better understand who is buying, improve the sales process and increase cross-selling and up selling potential.

Just like their enterprise counterparts, on-line companies are continually optimizing for converting leads to sales. At the heart of that effort is the quality of the customer information used throughout the sales process. The real-time nature of the on-line transaction is ideal for real-time verification and enhancement of data to improve the customer experience and decrease cost. Major areas for improvement are:

• Reduce potential fraud
• Put clean data in the data base for future marketing efforts
• Add postal information to reduce shipping errors
• Append valuable information about B2B customers including; annual sales, key executives, and check credit
• Make sure sales tax data is up to date

About StrikeIron

StrikeIron also offers a set of products and tools to simplify and accelerate the consumption of data such as its SOA Express for Excel, enabling business users to access live data via front office applications. StrikeIron delivers value to over 1,000 customers and partners such as BEA, Delivery.com, IBM, Honda Europe, D&B, Time Warner, Siemens, Nike, Kenwood, and Exclusive Resorts. For more information, visit www.strikeiron.com.

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