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 eCommerce Catalog
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 like 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 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 that centralizes the data with a single view with an efficient and consistent way of managing the product data across multiple channels.
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.