eCommerce Product Catalog Management - Importance, Challenges, Practices, and Scopes
Product quality is a critical yet important factor, which determines the customer’s level of satisfaction after post-purchase from your brand. To ensure that your loyal customers keep on purchasing from your brand, you need to serve them with the highest product quality and high-quality product information.
Product quality is also one of the important contributors to more revenue and higher profitability. For higher product quality, the customer is willing to pay a higher price and something that can’t be overlooked.
What is eCommerce Product Catalog Management?
An e-commerce website contains the product name, price, description, the hierarchy of products, supplier information, product availability, and much more product-related information. Now, does the e-commerce website deal with just one single type of product? Of Course, not; the website handles thousands of different products and has millions of product-related data.
eCommerce Product Catalog Management is a dynamic process, in which products are categorized or organized in one specific way to ensure that customers get high-quality product data across all channels. With Product catalog management, your brand can deliver high-quality product data to customers in their desired format.
Why is eCommerce Product Catalog Management Important?
Product catalog management is important because it brings the below-mentioned perks for your e-commerce business.
1. To deliver a consistent and rich customer experience
Any business is incomplete without its customers. A customer can break or make the business in any way he/she wants. To keep your business away from customer’s unsatisfactory levels towards your business and to deliver a rich customer experience, you need to manage the product catalog.
The customer’s product purchase process is incomplete without an accurate product description. A customer does not entertain any factor that comes in their way to hinder this process. The accurate product description is available to customers with only product catalog management. With product catalog management, you are ensuring that your customers have rich and consistent product information.
2. Boost business expansion
Your business expansion is nothing but introducing a new product range to your business. With Product Catalog Management, you can manage new and existing products by assigning them to their respective categories.
You don’t longer need to worry about the chaos which new products may bring to your business. You can introduce new products and expand your business with ease, with the help of product catalog management. Newly introduced products will be categorized according to the state of the product, and into its respective field.
3. Categories products inefficient manner
With Product catalog Management, you can efficiently categorize products. Managing product information is a tedious task and mismanagement of product information may lead to the wrong categorization of products. This will cause trouble for your customers as they are not comfortable buying products with inaccurate descriptions.
With Product catalog management, you ensure that an accurate product description is attached with an accurate product and the product indeed belongs to the category, in which it is put forward. The efficient categorization will boost up customer’s confidence in your brand.
Do you want to leverage the above-listed benefits considering accurate and effective product catalog management?
Challenges Of Product Catalog Management
There are some challenges, which you may face while managing your product catalog.
Involvement of Stakeholders
If the product units differ from what your supplier said and what is available in your system, then the management of the product catalog can be more complex for you to handle. The involvement of multiple stakeholders within the organization and outside the organization will be a challenging task to manage.
Usability
You might categorize the product in the way that is most suitable to your system. The same data format needs to be matched with the expectations of customers. i.e. For your customers, the usability of data could be different from the one you have managed for them. This challenge is crucial because there is no alternative to it.
Catalog Management tool
You are expected to have a deep understanding of the management tool; you must know the functions of the tool before choosing it for your business. Being a business owner, you may or may not sound with technical expertise and that is challenging itself.
Expansion of Catalog
As you expand your business, you also need to expand your product catalog. The expansion is critical because you don’t just have to manage the newly introduced products, but you also need to manage its impact on your existing product catalog system.
Are you facing any such challenges while managing your product catalog? We would love to help you in addressing your challenges.
8 Best Practices for e-commerce catalog management in 2021
1. Create brand trust with quality product information
The first and foremost important thing for you to do is to gain the trust of your customers. You need to ensure that whatever product information you are putting forward in front of them is accurate and reliable. Accurate product information will boost up their trust towards your brand and that will encourage them to continue buying from your brand.
You can gain the trust of your customers if you are delivering what they have expected from you. To ensure that your customers don’t get roam around with inaccurate information, you need to update your data on a time-to-time basis; you need to include comprehensive information related to products, and you need to make sure that a high-quality product image is accessible to your customers.
2. Tag and categorize your digital product catalog
You can tag and categorize all your products so that your customers can browse and filter out the product. This will help them in buying the product much faster, as the product is sorted in its particular product catalog. When you tag and categorize products, keep in mind that the product tagging is for the customer’s ease.
The option of filtering the product will help your customers in the product purchase process and customers can even buy similar products from the catalog, which they might need along with their original product. Thus, you are generating revenue without pushing customers to buy the secondary product. Additional product attributes will help your customers and it will help your business too.
3. Map your catalog management process
The involvement of stakeholders will cause you to challenge the management of your product catalog. One of the ways to overcome this challenge is to map your catalog management process. While mapping, you can pinpoint the pain points that you come across in your process.
In mapping, you can have a clear understanding of the areas affected the most by catalog changes. You can know when your internal and external stakeholders are affected. The mapping process will elaborate when and how you should update your product catalog. Your mapping process will update you about the further steps that your business needs to take to attain maximum profit.
4. Upsell and cross-sell with related and alternative products
As stated earlier, once you tag and categorize your products, you are increasing the chances of product-related, secondary products getting sold along with the primary product. Thus, you are generating more revenues with minimal or no-added efforts. You are helping your customers in their crucial product purchase decision.
You are increasing your order value with upselling. In this, you are not just being biased for your benefit, but your customers are also getting the proper product, which they are going to need alongside the primary product. With upsell and cross-sell related products, you are guiding your customers in what to buy and what not to buy.
5. Easily manage your e-commerce product catalog database
For optimization of your catalog, you need to maintain a database and manage your e-commerce product catalog. eCommerce catalog management is an information catalog and you can keep a clean track of it by keeping a single source of truth for your various product catalogs. When the database is available in one single source, it is more efficient and effective.
To maintain the database safe and secure, do not forget to give authorization to concerned parties. You should also define the roles and responsibilities across all channels so there would not be any miscommunication or mismanagement of the database. When you expand your business and introduce new products, you also need to maintain and update your database accordingly.
6. Select a catalog management tool
Selecting the best catalog tools needs technical knowledge. Though, you can perform a little survey that helps you in determining a catalog management tool that fits best in your business requirement. There are many tools available in the market for product catalogs.
Based on the needs of your business, you need a management tool that takes care of your overall business activities and makes your workflow smooth. You should first examine the state of your business, the business’s needs, the complexity of the product catalog, and your future-long-term goals. Pick a tool that fits in all.
7. Personalize your B2B e-commerce product catalog
For B2B eCommerce, price and product complexity are more severe than B2C e-commerce, and that is why the need for a product catalog is more important in B2B business. When you try to provide personalized solutions to your B2B customers, then you need to keep on checking whether your personalized solutions are relevant to customer’s needs or not.
8. Balance your offline and online catalogs
If you keep track of your product catalog offline and online, then learn how to use these two as complementary to each other. Ensure that both online and offline product catalogs are going hand-in-hand.
Are you looking for a technology partner that enables you with product catalog management where you can update the product information on the fly?
5 Tips To Improve Your eCommerce Product Catalog
1. Choose the best category
You can’t put your product hierarchy too vast or too narrow. If you keep it too vast, then customers will not be able to reach the exact product, which they need. If you will keep your product hierarchy too narrow, then your customers will not be able to explore new products. So, choose the best category that lets your customers buy the product with minimal trouble.
2. Selling Strategies
Never bind your customers by letting them buy just one product from you, keep on suggesting to the various related products according to their products added in the cart. Make your customers buy the things, which they were not planning to buy in the first place.
3. SEO-rich content
Ensure that your content is SEO-rich and that you don’t have duplicate data. Try to keep your content unique and SEO-friendly, if you will imply the same product information on every related product; your customers are going to lose interest in a product and your brand.
4. Pruning
You need to perform the pruning process to help SEO. You need to remove or update pages that no longer fulfill your SEO requirement or are lagging in providing higher SEO-rich content. Remove unwanted content so that relevant content can take place to boost SEO ranking.
5. Product Description
A good product description is short, crispy, and yet informative. Write a short product description that has all relevant information in it, which customers are ever going to require. Include bullet points and bold, specific information, which can’t be overlooked by customers.
Are you ready to create a product catalog that helps you win customers’ trust by sharing the updated and accurate product information?
List of Top 6 Best Catalog Management Software
1. Pimcore
Pimcore is an open-source platform that enables brands with a highly advanced Product Information Management framework. PIM of Pimcore contains the capabilities of Product Catalog management.
It contains advanced features like centralized product catalogs, enriched product content, product feed management, digital asset management, and print catalogs.
2. ServiceNow IT Service Management
It is modern, cloud-based software that is faster, automated, and smarter Software. This silo-busting solution will boost your productivity up to 20% more and will take the burden away from your IT department. This software is the best software to improve customer experience and optimize shared data.
3. Syndigo Content Experience Hub
This software allows you to store all of your product-related information in one single location. Everyone has the same product-rich information with this software. With this software you can have a faster time-to-market, you can have standardized content, you can consume more data, and can have faster expansion of the product line.
4. Salsify Commerce Experience Management Platform
It is the best software that justifies the customer’s decision to purchase from an e-commerce platform. This software is best as it is a combination of product information management (PIM), digital asset management ( DAM), and thus it delivers the best customer experience to your customers.
5. Plytix
This software is PIM-product information management software that is user-friendly and has comparatively lower prices than others. It is a popular software amongst some small to medium e-commerce businesses. This software has great functions and those are easy to use, yet effective.
6. Flxpoint
This software connects your sales with eCommerce operations, so everything works on an automated process, and you don’t have any unwanted burden on yourself. Everything would be fully automated so that you no longer need to do any manual work.
Do you want to explore how Pimcore will help you manage your product catalog effectively and accurately?
Conclusion
Proper product catalog management will benefit both, your business and your customers. Your customers will have accurate product information that they are going to need to complete their product purchase decision, while you will have maximum profit with minimal effort.
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