Why all eCommerce merchants need Product Catalog Management?

by eCommerceblog

ECommerce  trends are changing with the changing world. Every customer demands high quality, consistent product information before they purchase anything online. Thus eCommerce merchants have to meet this demand to stay ahead of their competitors. Here comes the role of catalog management.

          Product catalog management is a marketing strategy for organizing standardizing cleansing and publishing your product data for enhancing high sales of the product. A product catalog is a type of marketing broucher, that lists product details that helps buyers make a purchase decision. These details include product features, descriptions, dimensions, price, weight, color, availability, customer reviews and more.

          The best example of a product catalog is the Amazon market place, where you can get bundle of information in a single click. For example, if you want to buy a wrist watch- Amazon lists all the information that you need like it is for male or female, brand name, color of the dial, price, availability, offer/discounts, reviews and more. A product catalog is needed for both B2B and B2C domains.

Who needs Product Catalog?

Product catalogs are useful to several business users and groups such as sales reps, buyers, store and warehouse managers, field marketers, external parties such as agencies, partners.

Reasons why you need a product catalog

 #1. Help Retailers :

To overcome certain challenges like selling across multiple channels, updating products constantly, expanding product catalog, dealing with suppliers data and keeping data quality consistent. ECommerce catalog management helps merchants to build a good foundation for their business.

#2. Enhance users experience :

customers browse a product  on an online market place and may navigate to the business website for further information to help them in making a purchase decision. Here the product catalog helps the customer by providing accuracy and reliability of product information. As customer satisfaction has become the moto of today’s competitive eCommerce business. Thus eCommerce businesses must ensure consistency and accuracy of their product information across the multiple sales channels and platforms to provide a consistent customer experience.

#3. Improves conversion rate :

The main aim of product catalog management is to convert the visitors into a loyal customer. When customers have all the data that they need, they can make decision and buy the product, Thus increasing the conversion rate. A clear product catalog helps the customer during their browsing period and also helps them to buy the product of their choice.

#4. Enhance branding :

managing the entire product portfolio information is a challenging task and time consuming. Poor product categorization may leave a bad impact of your website. Thus may cause disappointments and inconvenience to the customers. As a result you may lose a potential customer of your brand. Difficulty in accessing your product data may affect the buying decision and you may lose a loyal customer. Product information documents are useful to promote a company’s brand. Using distinct colors, images, logo helps in enhancing your brand. A well organized product catalog system enables the customers to explore the products online with ease and optimized their experience.

#5.Helps in growing your business :

A good product catalog management will help in growing your business. A good product catalog allows you to support a bigger number of products; that you will be adding as per the changes and demand in the market. Excellent product catalog makes it easy for you to add more products; and push them to your sales channels without any problem.

#6. Generates sales offline :

Today, buyers research products online and make purchases offline in malls, shops, events etc; in such instances, it is important to help customers with information on their mobiles, iPads to fasten their buying process. Websites, landing pages with a clear product catalog enables customers to do research; and collect information about the product and thus making up their mind to buy the product.

#7.Omni channel experience :

managing catalog across various channels is a complex process. It is important to efficiently manage product data and maintain consistency across different channels to ensure shoppers find your product easily and have a great users experience. A proper catalog management should be built effectively to allow you to easily access product information from suppliers and publish it across different platforms. Thus catalog management allows you to maintain consistency across different channels enabling you to offer omni channel experience.

#8. Challenges :

Product catalog management is highly essential for retail brands to survive and strive in the ever changing business environment. There are certain challenges associated with their ever changing business. For instance today’s customers have shifted from desktop applications to multi-device and multi screen usage. Your product should be accessible across multiple platforms. Retailers face secondary challenge of optimizing t6heir product-catalog. Frequent updates related to the products such as changes in price, addition of new features etc, should be done at regular intervals.

Conclusion :

Efficient catalog management services help optimize time and cost in managing large volume of product data. Well presented products, appealing designs and relevant description optimizes the online store on search engine and also simplifies navigation. A well organized catalog enhance business growth.    

Product Catalog Management

Best Practices: eCommerce Product Catalog Management

by with No Comment eCommerceblog

Customers are well-versed with the online technology now. From online shopping to online ticket reservation; several usual activities have transformed from offline to online. Customers navigate through various websites before making their decision. Hence, an eCommerce business must be able to provide the right product information to customers at all times.

A product catalog is essential for every eCommerce business and it ensures that the products are conveniently available online. An efficient product catalog directly impacts the sales of the organization. However, creating and managing a product catalog effectively can be challenging at times.

Challenges in Product Catalog Management

  • Different information coming in from multiple stakeholders from inside and outside the organization. For example, if measurement units differ then it can create a major problem in product catalog management

  • If the internal data is not converted properly for users, then incorrect product categorization can create issues.

  • Choosing a catalog management tool can be a challenge in itself. Before selecting a tool, one must understand the working of the tool in detail.

  • Product catalog growth is directly proportional to business growth. The need of the organization must align with the need of catalog.

Let us look at some of the best practices of product catalog management:

1. Offer Quality Product Information

The importance of providing valuable and correct product information to the customer can never be emphasized. The first objective is to ensure that your customers feel comfortable while they navigate through the eCommerce website. This also means that the website must not only be user friendly, but also customers must be able to easily locate their desired product.

By offering accurate product information customers will start trusting your brand and this will help them make faster purchase decisions. High quality product information includes technical attributes, attractive high-resolution images, videos, inventory information, units of measurement, and product usage combinations and recommendations. All the information must be updated to optimize the overall shopping experience of the customer.

2. Categorizing product catalog

Customers look for easy navigation options and clear categories like filter, refine, colors, etc. However, one must categorize their product catalog by considering the customer’s point of view. For example:

  • Using ‘M’ to denote “Medium” to represent a product size

  • Keeping consistency in all measurement units

  • Adding various product attributes to different products based on customer needs and not have limited attributes to all products

3. Measuring the catalog management process

To effectively manage a product catalog the business must understand three pointers and analyze them from time to time:

1. Which parts of the product catalog are managed by the stakeholders?

2. Who is affected by the catalog changes?

3. When during the process does the changes affect the most?

Once you are able to understand these factors, you can quickly seek for the right person who can help you during the mapping process. Catalog management mapping processes helps you understand the different steps to be taken and in which order.

4. Offer recommendations and suggest alternatives

A product catalog must not only offer the right product information, but also suggest alternatives and recommendations for different products. This will give ideas to the customers and also provide alternatives in case a desired product is out of stock.

5. Managing your Product Catalog Database

Catalog management is similar to information management and must be maintained well. Hence, one must create a product catalog database to ensure that the right information is given to the customer. This also prevents information errors and enables expansion of products.

The above-mentioned best practices will help an eCommerce business to manage their product catalog efficiently. The eCommerce businesses are developing online as well as offline product catalogs in order to provide maximum shopping experience to their customers. While online catalogs help in faster navigation through the website, offline catalogs help in easy-to-read experience for the customers. Both are equally important to enhance business sales.