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How Crucial is Catalog Building and Indexing

by with No Comment eCommerce

The eCommerce Catalog Building and Indexing enhances a customer’s shopping experience online. Retailers are looking for ways to keep B2B and B2C customers informed and engaged about the products in their e-store. A well managed online product catalog helps to meet customer behaviors by ensuring visibility for your products. A clear and concise catalog will highlight your company as well as build trust and credibility between the customer and your business.

ECommerce Catalog Management is the process of organizing data in a consistent, user-friendly, attractive manner across all sales channels like Digital channels such as Websites, Apps, Automated Retail such as self-service kiosks, Resellers, Whole sellers, Agents and others.

The online catalog provides precise information about your e-store products such as product name, descriptions, price, supplier or manufacturer information, and other related product details. Any information regarding the products needs to be accurate for customers to identify with the product they are looking for.

People are spending more time online than ever, so it is imperative for retailers to have catalog data that gives the best online experience. Products with vague information result in loss of business revenue. An organized data that is cataloged gives users the opportunity for product discovery which is crucial for sales conversion. 

Here are the benefits of Catalog Building and Indexing that retailers cannot overlook. 

1. Instant launch of New Products in the market

Retailers are launching new products every month; they need to be instantly available for customers over multiple channels. It can take 30 to 60 days for products to go from offline to online digitization. Catalog management like Automated tagging of inventory helps to classify inventory into appropriate categories by auto-generating product attributes, data discrepancies, and fixing data inconsistencies. Automated enriched product data will be enriched, consistent and uploaded for the customers across all sales channels simultaneously.

2. Better Omni Channel Experience due to Automated Tagging

Automated Retail Solutions helps in product accuracy and to keep track of inventory on a real-time basis. Retailers need precise inventory statistics for sales and that is enabled by correct categorization of products. Automated product with catalog management tags help brands to keep track of stocks providing a hassle-free omnichannel experience for their customers. 

3. Increased Loyalty Base from Customers

Traditional manual product tagging procedures require a lot of man-hours for eg: tagging 200 to 300 products a day can take up to 30-40 hours. With high possibilities of inaccuracies that can range from visual inaccuracy to misclassified product title; to wrong tags, automated tagging is a saving grace for many retailers and distributors to get the tens of thousands of tagging products in minutes with accuracy. Customers will be able to locate products closest to what they are looking for giving them a good online experience making them loyal to the brand.  

4. Faster discovery of products by Customers

Catalog building and indexing in the order that is filtered by Manufacturer, Brand, Price, Type, Products, and more; allows high-quality and unified product information to be visible and helps customers narrow their search preferences faster. With the right categorization, chances of shoppers discovering and buying a product are more likely resulting in more transactions.

5. Real Time Inventory Visibility reducing the gap between Demand and Supply

Retails can gauge their product stock better with the catalog management    process. This allows them to gauge their inventory such as categories, subcategories, images, layout, and more; for their audiences with varied preferences in purchasing patterns. So, for a retailer, its a must to accurately tag products in their inventory to ascertain their product stock better. This helps to analyze the inventory stock based on the product categories. And also, helps to connect with audiences enabling smarter merchandising and better forecasting of business revenue. Catalog management helps retailers tend to customer demands in real-time.

Conclusion

Catalog Building and Indexing processes help to acquire consistent product databases by identifying duplicates, correcting errors, standardizing naming, titles. Moreover, it helps retailers, distributors, and manufacturers to take stock of inventory and connect their products with the right consumers online.

Altius technologies enhance customer experience by making important product information quickly and easily accessible. So, you can avail Altius’ Catalog Building and Indexing Services for a faster time-to-market. Thus helping customers discover your products quickly and efficiently.

Altius PIM Services

Challenges of eCommerce Catalog Management

by with No Comment eCommercePIMblog

Catalog Management is the process of managing your eCommerce Product Catalog to ensure the integrity and quality of the product data across different sales channels. A product catalog is a detailed list of inventory of a store, which consists of product images descriptions, specifications, price, and more. The process of organizing, standardizing, and publishing this information to multiple sales channels is what product catalog management is all about. 

Companies need catalog management to keep up with the huge stock of SKU’s (Stock Keeping Unit) for different sales channels. It is hard to maintain the integrity of huge quantities of product data and time consuming to keep track of the update in product data which results in incorrect and improper product data representation. 

Common Challenges of Catalog Management

Product Types

Product types make SKU management more complex because products vary by attributes like size or color. Products come in a different part or as a single individual part, keeping track of the hierarchy of product parts can be hard to manage. 

Managing across multiple channels

When selling across different channels besides the company’s own website is a difficult task. Public market places such as eBay, Overstock, Amazon creates a challenge for cataloging the products; in the sense that each product is formatted in a different manner while listing. So it becomes hard to keep track of often resulting in publishing duplicate or incomplete product data.

Dealing with third party data

Data from different sectors like distributors, manufacturers, and suppliers come in all sorts of formats. It is a humongous task to transform each and every detail into a single internal standard format. It requires large teams who spend weeks compiling, updating, and publishing the product data which could also result in the wrong and inconsistent data for customers. 

Capacity to handle infinite data

As your e-store gets established, it will have more product data coming in. It will get hard to organize data that is not in control. Expanding the product catalog becomes a challenge which in turn affects the day to day activities of the e-store stunting its revenue growth. 

Consistent Data Quality

All of the above challenges affect the quality of the data. Maintaining your product data while simultaneously expanding the catalog, communicating with suppliers; and also publishing on multiple sales channels will be a hard task. With inconsistent product attributes such as wrong spellings, missing information, wrong descriptions, or attributes, it can be overwhelming to maintain a consistent standard. 

These are the reasons why you need to invest in a strong data management system like Altius InRiver PIM. So, this centralizes the data with a single view; with an efficient and consistent way of managing the product data across multiple channels.

Altius InRiver PIM

Altius InRiver PIM saves investors and e-business owners from spending enormous time cleaning up product data; enabling to list rich, high-quality product data across all of their channels.

images are important for e store

Why images are important for your e-store?

by with No Comment eCommerceblog

Images are visual representations of text. It is certainly true that one image is equal to 10,000 words. Viewers relate instantly to an image representation of the product.

Image guarantees the authenticity of your products. Customers looking to buy products look for a snapshot of the products in order to identify them.  Without images, the product becomes suspicious to the customer and the customer becomes apprehensive to confidence to make a purchase.

Images need to be of high quality, appropriate size showcasing varied angles of the products in the right light, setting and background.

Thus product images are a necessity for eCommerce success.

Customer Attention

Images create visual impact in your e-store, so quality images are essential that will catch the user’s attention because it is the first thing the user gets attracted to. People cannot touch and feel products in an e-store, so it is essential to portray the best version of the products through images.

An ideal  product image would be crystal clear pictures of the product in different angles that provides a clear idea of the product to the user. The image options should include viewing angles, zoom, multiple images, and more.

Let’s look at some of the must have features when a product is displayed in an image of an e-store.

1. Quality & Quantity of Image

Quality of an image not only brings clarity of the product of your e-store but also enhances the visual appeal of your e-store.

Customers will be convinced of their choice when the product is displayed in the most appealing manner. Most images of your product with different angles will give an added perspective to the customer to make the choice of buying the product.

2. Image Size

Image size is an important factor before uploading your images. Proper size of the image with dynamic zooming facility will be convenient for the user to get a better view of the image instead of a static one.

Poor quality and oversized or undersized images will create a bad impression for your e-store, reducing the demand for your products.

Altius recommends a guideline size for your product images that is 1024 X 1024 pixels for the best impact.

3. Proper Backgrounds

 A uniform, clean and smooth background provides the customer with a good experience. And will also help them to choose a product. It is highly recommended to shoot your photography at a clean and shiny place; where your product images will come very bright and clear for the customer to view. Investing in a good photography camera will pay dividends later for your e-commerce store. With tons of free image footage available on the internet, choosing only free images without watermarks should be considered.  Altius professionals help to redesign the colored and watermarked background to white image background. This makes free available images on the internet usable. 

With digitization penetrating all the areas of our lives, having an e-store is imperative today. Having a strong online presence will outreach your brand and business globally.  Altius has been consistently delivering efficient and reliable image services such as Image Collection, Image Capturing and Editing; for clients across various domains like Electrical, Electronics, Clothing, Jewelry, Safety & Security Industries and many more.

Taxonomy

Taxonomy for Better Understanding of Data

by with No Comment contenteCommerce

Product Taxonomy Development for Better Data

In a world revolving around internet and everything going online, we all agree to the fact that taxonomy is the backbone of the whole classification process. It helps in sorting the categories in a proper hierarchy for a better visibility of commodities online.

Taxonomy is extensive as it plays a vital part in user’s mindset of the website and the commodities/ products on it. If not for proper classification, a website becomes more of a confusing one. For example, we are buying a phone, we expect the salesman to display the phones in meaningful categories like iOS, Android, Windows and brand wise. Similarly, when it comes to business, content stored in a website should be categorized.

Designing a functional taxonomy involves figuring the types content and mapping them with data and defining word tag characteristics. Our content management approach and search approaches would now be able to be more compelling, enabling us to find all the data that relate to a product which enhances the find-ability which in-turn will reflect on the number of visitors and website users who will turn into buyers.

Each industry or company will be more likely to develop variations based on a classification scheme. For instance, an industrial tool manufacturing company will use terms like Solar, electrical, power tools, hand tools etc. a property builder will use terms like property, tenant, shopping center etc. Developing Taxonomy will include mapping out the sorts of data/content to be categorized and catalogued.

If your online website doesn’t have much sales, it means there isn’t much recognition and does not appear on top when searched for. Time to rethink about taxonomy – if your company doesn’t have one, it is high time you approach us to provide one. We will be the answer to your visitors queries like ‘No relevant product’, ‘takes too long to find the product’, ‘Under wrong category’ etc. Take steps now and make your site user-friendly and let your products be more visible and easy to find.

 

Ravinthar R

Asses e-stores and recommend revenue generating SaaS solutions

Product description

Is Product Description Mandatory to Boost Up Your Sales in E-Commerce?

by with No Comment eCommerce

Why is Product Description Mandatory?

YES, it is!

Product descriptions have long been exponent in both sales and in SEO tactic.

A lot of E-commerce Entrepreneurs while starting their online business usually underrating the Prize of quality content. Instead, more focus is usually given on putting good quality images and technical aspect, but a cracking quality product description is equally significant to boost your sales.

Most E-commerce Business owners who don’t understand the significant of good product description, lose their customers no matter how much investment they make in Advertisement & Marketing. While your e-commerce business is making some genuinely good efforts to post unique and attractive descriptions for every product without just copy & paste from other sites, then you are the Guru among your E-commerce rivals. Many E-commerce Entrepreneurs take the easy way with product descriptions, and they just copy paste from the manufacturer’s website or brochures.

The best advice is simply: Don’t Do this.

Because, Google analyse the duplicate content very easily via The Google Panda algorithm and if you have the same product descriptions in other websites then Google has no idea that which site would be ranked higher and those sites will often drop down in the rankings as a result.

Reasons Why Product Descriptions are Significant to E-Commerce?

  • Badly written descriptions leads to devaluing that website or their products
  • Short, Crisp & Quality content avoid time constraints that attracts more Targeted Audience
  • Enhances the SEO
  • Symbol of Professionalism
  • Error – Free Short descriptions attracts more customers
  • Enhances your Browsing Experiences
  • Helps to stay focus on Products

Remember, Quality is the most fundamental phenomena and to meet your e-commerce business successfully, you must keep these above points in mind that improves your brand’s ranking & make more sales, So don’t skimp over and make your product description unique because if you take it from rivals, you may find yourself ranked lower by Google or even get rid of from search results.

 

Govindaraj L

Responsible for Data Quality and Revenue Generation

e-commerce-sales

The relevance of Taxonomy and Attributes in e-Commerce Sales

by with No Comment contenteCommerce

Why Taxonomy and Attributes in e-Commerce Sales Important?

In the world of digital shopping, customers want to find products and their related information at lightning speed.

Having proper taxonomy and attributes is key to making this possible.

The big B2B and B2C players who are into e-commerce have paid great attention to these assets to enable the process of successfully converting a search into a sale.

How Taxonomy Works?

Taxonomy is a term used for grouping of products into different classifications or categories.

They are like departments to place your products providing easy navigation.

We have to create a well-structured hierarchy that directs the shoppers to the products easily. A top down approach is followed where the primary level is a generalized name that leads to the more specific products.

Naming conventions for the top level must include words that the customers search for incorporating the best search engine optimization (SEO) practices.

The next few levels in the taxonomy includes product specific names that lead to the end product quickly. This involves expertise and market research.

Providing Maximized Attributes

Most customers nowadays are quite tech-savvy and make comparisons with the competitor products before they make a purchase.

If the technical specifications and features are not available for the product, they might get turned away. Attributes are characteristics and specifications of a product that includes the brand, dimensions, color, material and more. We must ensure that all the relevant details pertaining to the product are provided in the site. Providing optimum attribute values in the site is extremely crucial when it comes to e-commerce.

This will make it easy for your customers to decide if the product is right for them and make a satisfied purchase.

Now, are you ready to convert your eStore visitor into a buyer?

Then, Altius Technologies can provide quality data and content for your product catalog to make this possible!!

To discuss more, kindly email us at info@altiussolution.com or visit our website at www.altiussolution.com

 

Ashok V

Online R&D of e-stores, Revenue Generation Consultant

Importance-of-Product-Information-for-Omni-Channel-Marketing

Importance of Product Information for OmniChannel Marketing

by with No Comment eCommerceblog

Business Issues without OmniChannel Marketing

Customers have changed their purchase behavior. It is getting difficult to predict which device they will use, what search phrases they will use and which channel they will like to receive messages and access your website.

Hence, you need to reach out to your customers in as many channels as you can. It is also important that you integrate all these channels to give a seamless experience to your customers.

The answer is Omni-Channel.

I am giving you some channels which almost all e-retailers use.

They are:

Brick & Mortar Retail Store
E-commerce Storefront
Website
Direct mail
Email
Mail order catalog
Mobile

You also know that your prospective customer can start the buying journey in any one of the channels, take decisions to purchase in another channel and finally complete the purchase in a different channel. The research usually starts with a search and landing on your website, leading to your e-commerce storefront for additional information. The prospective customer may also do multiple visits to a brick and mortar store to touch and feel, visiting the website to make a decision to purchase and the final purchase may happen on the Mobile.

The key to the Sales Conversion here is presenting accurate and similar Product Information across all the channels to help the customer can get confident and make a buying decision. The challenge before companies of all sizes is the high cost of creating different formats of Product & Sales information for multiple channels. Maintaining them is complex when you consider selling across multiple cities and multiple languages.

To manage these you need to create and capture detailed Cross-Channel product information as a Single Source of Truth to be published across different Channels in different formats for a seamless customer experience. You can centrally control and maintain consistent Product Information across channels and also helps you save on significant costs on maintenance and version control.

How do you create an OmniChannel Experience?

  • Create and deploy a Master Product Information Strategy / Roadmap
  • Build a single comprehensive data model that would help you collate high-quality sets of data.
  • Implement a Product Information Management Tool which streamlines the Storage, Dissemination, and Maintenance of Data across Channels.
  • Scope out and help you implement a Data Governance Program to maintain new Product Information that you had from time to time through our New Product Introduction Managed Service Programme.
  • Measure, Monitor and Help your organization to utilize the Product Information from Higher Sales Conversion.

Benefits of Implementing an OmniChannel System

  • Company-wide single repository of Product Information that is available to all Channels including Marketing, Store Personnel, Distribution Partners, and Customers.
  • Single Source of creation and multiple automated channels of dissemination of Product Information resulting in high level of consistency and cost savings.
  • Quicker product launches across all channels
  • Accurate and consistent information across channels that will lead to a better customer experience & improved sales conversion.
  • Increased efficiency of Inside and External Sales Teams as information is available accurately across channels.
  • Considerable reduction in Return Merchandise cost.
  • Increased Loyalty and Brand value.

 

Ravinthar R

Asses e-stores and recommend revenue generating SaaS solutions

final-trades-man

What do your tradesmen expect out of your Product Catalog?

by with No Comment eCommerce

Your tradesmen operate from the field and hence they have limited time and bandwidth.

They would require information instantly to take decisions to order products on the field.

The customer chooses the products by punching the product number if they know about the product.

The customer chooses the faceted search if they do not know about the product.

Therefore, the search bar should be intelligent enough to understand the industry terminology. The other information they need is also to look for the confirmation of the application areas compatibility.

The customer hence would expect two things – get the most relevant products within a few clicks through the right attribute selection and an attractive price of the product.

How can you make your faceted search accurate?

  • Decide the top navigation attributes from a tradesmen’s perspective
  • Cross-mapping of your competitor’s part numbers to display your product for findability
  • Displaying your Images in multiple dimensions and changes
  • Special features for fitment of application types captured as attributes
  • Structuring the data for mobile use as well

Client Benefits

  • Tradesmen complete the transaction in the shortest possible time and hence increase brand loyalty.
  • Better product findability enables a reduction in returns
  • Allows the tradesmen to select substitutable products and hence increase the sales opportunity

 

Deepika Ganapathi

Responsible for Revenue generation and Enhancing User Experience in e-stores