If you are a seller or a reseller then eCommerce is a platform that connects you with customers across the globe. You need to showcase your products and make money out of them.
There are multiple products in different categories that are available online. On a platform where a million products exist, how do you make your business stand out? How do you ensure users come to your website and buy something from you? The answer lies in the product information.
Businesses have to ensure that all the product information displayed on their eCommerce store is streamlined, accurate, convincing, and consistent. Every customer would want to have easy access to the right and reliable product information.
Helps them make the best purchase decision!
This brings you to make your eCommerce product catalog accessible and trusted by the online visitors to generate leads and then, close the deal.
In an era of high digital competition, any business that exists online and manages multiple sales channels must have an active eCommerce product catalog management process in place.
Now, before we dive deep into the product catalog systems, their challenges, and their importance, let us take a quick overview of what a product catalog is.
What is a product catalog?
Gone are those days where product catalogs were just a fashionable exhibition of products in glossy magazines. Product catalogs are a compilation of all the products a business has to offer with its detailed product description, attributes, and product images. Product catalogs also mention a call to action, to redirect the customer to the actual sale.
According to a source, a customer spends an average of about 15.5 minutes looking into a product catalog, before making a purchase decision.
Product catalogs help the customers identify various product categories and navigate across them.
eCommerce product catalog management is essential but comes with its own set of challenges. The management of a product catalog is one of the biggest pain points for a business. Let us now get familiar with the problems and their solutions.
Challenges of eCommerce Product Catalog Management
Entering the product data
The process of manually entering product data can be very time-consuming and prone to mistakes. There are a lot of tools that can automate the whole process but it comes at a cost. Budding eCommerce enterprises cannot bear a lot of these operational costs and this can be a major challenge for them.
Lack of a unified storage hub
If you are a company that has multiple product lines you might have multiple spreadsheets to maintain. These multiple spreadsheets and their maintenance often lead to discrepancies and become very time-consuming when the business expands and brings in newer products.
Vendors, suppliers, and any third parties who are involved need a centralized data management system to eliminate any kind of hurdles or difficulties that come in the process.
Usability
When you are on an eCommerce product management system you need to make sure all the information you enter translates well into information that a consumer wants to see.
The information has to be customer-friendly and needs to answer their questions. The product data on the catalog management system should be customized and the closest fit for the customer expectations to catch their attention and get conversions for sales.
There might be challenges that come in the process of setting up an efficient eCommerce product catalog but we got you covered. There isn’t a single way or a rule to create a great product catalog, but here are two quick pro-tips or practices you must follow to manage your eCommerce product catalog efficiently and make the best out of it.
Quick tips for better eCommerce product catalog management
Quality information
When a business is managing an eCommerce product catalog, its main aim is to target its customers and be convincing enough for an actual sale to happen. To achieve this, you must provide information that is crisp, to the point and is comprehensive enough for the end-user.
Your potential customers will start building trust in your brand only when they see you displaying all the information accurately. To make sure your eCommerce product catalog has good quality content, you should provide all the details that a person should know to assess a product.
This includes details like technical attributes, physical measurements, and inventory information. Along with entering all the information on the product catalog, your business also has to keep in mind that the information is up-to-date at all times.
In cases like these, you can connect your web store to ERP software that will automatically keep your records updated. Interesting visuals always go a long way, so it is always a great idea to support your text with some interesting high-quality pictures to keep the users attracted.
By using multiple media formats you will be able to attract a larger audience to your web page and then lead to converting them.
Upsell and cross-sell
How many times were you only looking to order for a burger and you also ended up ordering fries and nuggets? Exactly the point. Having a feature to suggest the related products available in your eCommerce product catalog is a very easy way to increase the average order value.
Suggesting similar products to tempt the buyer into buying more is what a good eCommerce product catalog should do.
Now that we’ve read the challenges of eCommerce product catalog management and two pro tips to help you ace the game, let us know the importance of having product catalog management systems and why they are important in the success of any eCommerce store.
Importance of product catalogs and product catalog management
Better user experience
eCommerce product catalog management makes you enter all the product data, which leads to the web store having all the product information for the users to see. These details include shipping information, physical attributes, technicalities, images, and reviews.
All of this data counts in for an enhanced user experience aiding the customers to make better buying decisions. Product catalogs will help you as a brand to give out all the necessary information and make sure the potential customer trusts you following a definite sale.
A centralized system for all data
Maintaining various spreadsheets for all kinds of parties involved in your business can be a very tedious task. Over a while when you are constantly introducing new product lines, it can be difficult for you to manage so much at once.
Product catalog management systems allow managing product data easily and leave less or maybe no room for any kind of redundancy. It also helps in collating all the data on a single centralized repository that allows access and visibility to different people at different levels in the organization. Having a centralized repository for all the product data is one of the key benefits of having a product catalog management system.
A customer-specific pricing
B2B businesses need a lot of customer-specific pricing solutions. In B2B cases, the prices of the products or services will depend on who is buying it, what quantity they are buying it in, and a lot of such factors.
Companies need customized quotes for different customers and here is where catalog management systems come into the picture. These eCommerce catalog management systems will ensure that the correct pricing is mentioned and is customizable.
Categorization of the product range
To collate and maintain product data of hundreds of products can be an overwhelming task. Not only is it time-consuming but also requires a lot of manual guidance. Inappropriate classification or categorization of products can be very irritating for a user.
This might lead to a user abandoning a sale or not coming back to the website ever. Improper categorization also causes problems in performing searches. Catalog management systems can help you with this.
It will aid in making sure the right products are under the right tags allowing a comprehensive approach to customers. It will also make the whole navigation process easier.
The importance of having eCommerce product catalogs and a good system managing it can only be summarised in this blog post. There are numerous benefits these eCommerce product catalog management systems come with.
Managing huge product catalogs
eCommerce product catalog systems make the life of businesses a lot easier. They provide services like management of content, uploading truckloads of data, processing high-definition images, and in general maintaining these huge eCommerce product catalogs with great efficiency. eCommerce product catalog systems need to make sure that all of these services are provided to make the business have a great product catalog.
Easy convertibility
It is important for eCommerce product catalog systems to have easy accessibility and convertibility options. Conversion of product catalogs into digital formats and then uploading it to different formats like Excel, HTML, pdf, and XML. Features like these make it very easy for businesses to have their catalogs in different formats and integration across all platforms becomes quicker.
Adding new products
The eCommerce product catalog systems also allow you to add products to your catalog when you want to scale up your business and add multiple categories to classify different products. Classification and categorization of products will aid businesses in providing better user experiences.
eCommerce product catalogs also help you update the catalog with new product variations and real-time pricing so that the sales representatives can quote the accurate prices and customers can also view the correct details with real-time pricing options.
Final Thoughts
One of the main goals of any eCommerce web store must be providing a seamless buying experience to the customer. This effortless experience will in turn result in lesser abandoned sales and higher conversions.
Companies that have a good user experience tend to grow better in the long run and have a higher number of loyal customers. Product catalog management is one of the most crucial factors in having a good brand identity and a company is profitable.
A well-built product catalog will cohesively support the management of all the product information from its creation to the stage of fulfillment and will surely help you streamline your business for optimum results.
