Your product catalog plays an important role in converting visitors to potential customers on your eCommerce store. Having an eCommerce product catalog makes sure that your products and product data are accessible online.
By improving your eCommerce catalog management, you can provide customers with a better user experience as they can visualize and imagine the products that they want.
In this guide, you will learn about some of the best eCommerce catalog management strategies that will help you strengthen your eCommerce store’s user experience.
What is eCommerce Catalog Management?
eCommerce catalog management is all about keeping your product data organized, structured, and up-to-date across all online sales channels.
The reason why catalog management is so vital for your eCommerce store is that it helps customers find the product they are looking for. When customers feel happy and satisfied with your eCommerce store, it contributes to a stronger brand image.
Read- The best Approach to Effective Ecommerce Catalog Management
5 Strategies to Improve Your eCommerce Catalog Management
Provide Customers with Quality Information
One of the best things that you can do to improve your eCommerce catalog management is to provide customers with relevant and quality information about the products.
Having low-quality product images, incomplete product data can totally disrupt the brand image of your eCommerce store.
That is why it should be your top priority to provide relevant information to the customers. For this, you will have to think about it from the consumer’s end. When a customer is looking for a product online, they want complete information, so that they can assess whether the product is fit for them or not.
That can be only achieved when you provide your customers with correct and relevant information about the products. Just remember these three-pointers while implementing this strategy:
- Provide Comprehensive Information: Your product catalog should contain all the necessary information about the products that you are selling. This includes technical specs, features, images, videos, etc. The goal should be to provide more value instead of more content and that is how you can provide your customers with complete information.
- Regularly Update the Info: Some of the products receive new features and upgrades and if you want your products to be relevant then you must keep your product content up to date.
- Design Should Be a Priority: If the design of your catalog is not good then the other two factors won’t matter much. The design of your catalog creates the first impression and that is why it should be of top-quality.
Effectively Tag and Categorize Your eCommerce Catalog
Just creating a product catalog for your eCommerce store is not going to cut it in such a competitive environment. You have to make your customer’s shopping journey pleasant and to do that, you will have to make it easy for them to find the products that they are looking for. By fine-tuning the search process for a customer, you can help them find a product with ease. One effective way of doing it is using tags for your products and then organizing them into relevant categories.
When you organize your eCommerce catalog using tags, filters, and categories, the users can quickly browse through the products and find the product that they need by seeing relevant products. For this process, you again have to think from a customer’s point of view and then you can customize your product search more effectively. For instance, if a customer is looking for pens on your B2B eCommerce store then they should find them under the Office Supplies category.
Add Related Products
One of the main goals of online catalog management is boosting the sales of your eCommerce store. This is where you can truly use product catalog management to boost your sales. You can increase your sales by selling related products that go perfectly with the original purchase. Your catalog must-have products and related products can go side-by-side.
For users, this works in a great way as they get some related and alternative product suggestions. On top of that, they can buy related products that go well with their purchase without actually searching for them separately. As a business owner, product suggestions are also great for you as they add more value to your purchase.
In a nutshell, your catalog database should show related products when a customer selects a particular product. Along with that, you can also add a list of alternative products. The alternative products can help a user decide what’s best for them.
Personalize Your B2B Catalog
When we talk about B2B eCommerce catalog management, by providing a custom product catalog with personalization options to your customers can significantly enhance the user experience of your eCommerce store and can better the customer retention rate.
Just remember to not cater the same things to different customers. There are a lot of different factors that contribute to a product catalog for B2B customers including pricing, quantity, discounts etc.
Product catalog differs for B2B customers based on customer types and as per ordering situations. That is why a custom product catalog becomes crucial. A lot of B2B eCommerce stores use PunchOut catalogs these days to address the needs of their customers by sending them personalized products catalogs in their own eProcurement platform.
To achieve this goal, you will have to find an eCommerce platform that can provide you with custom product catalog options or a PunchOut integration.
Use a Catalog Management Tool
Using a catalog management tool is one of the most important things that you can do to improve your eCommerce catalog management. Even a small eCommerce site handles hundreds of products and managing their data manually or using traditional methods can be time-consuming and can also have a lot of inconsistencies.
A product catalog management tool helps you streamline the eCommerce product content management and add new information according to your needs.
A catalog management tool can help you in:
- Importing and publishing product data on your eCommerce store.
- Optimize the product catalog
- Enhance the product catalog
- Export product data in different formats
Not only that, but a catalog management tool also:
Provides a Platform to Avoid Multiple Databases: When you have a good catalog management tool, you can manage all of your eCommerce product catalog-related processes from one tool only.
Manages Roles and Permissions: With a catalog management tool, you can assign roles and permission to the people who are responsible for updating the catalog. This eliminates unnecessary people from making changes to the catalog.
Provides Scalability Options: The end goal for any business is to grow and add more products to their eCommerce store. To help you with that, your catalog management tool has a scalability feature that helps in adding new product data with ease.
Closing Phrase
So that was all about the top 5 strategies to improve your eCommerce Product Catalog Management. You should implement these strategies right away to enhance the product catalog management on your eCommerce store. By doing so, you will be able to convert more visitors to customers on your online store. Along with this, you should also work on enhancing the user interface and user experience of your eCommerce store as they also contribute to boosting the sales of your eCommerce store.
