E-commerce Product Catalog Management (Complete Guide)

In this digital age, customers are flooded with a multitude of options. Hence a well-managed product catalog could mean the difference between a missed opportunity and a successful sale. But what actually does catalog management comprise, and how could it revolutionize your business?

In this article, we’ll explore why catalog management is very important, challenges involved, and the best ways to deal with them. Let’s get started!

What is Catalog management?

Catalog management is all about creating and managing products under various categories inorder to help the customers find what they are looking for, and make a purchase. This involves keeping track of details such as Product names, Descriptions, Prices, Variants, and other specifications. By ensuring these details are always up-to-date and accurate, businesses can boost the customer satisfaction levels.

Who needs Product Catalog Management?

Let’s take a look at who can benefit from effective Product Catalog Management: 

1. Retailers

Retailers offering a wide range of products across various categories will find PCM helpful for keeping product data organized and easily accessible.

2. Manufacturers and Distributors

PCM helps Manufacturers and distributors maintain accurate product data, ensuring clear communication and smooth supply chain operations.

3. Logistics Team

With PCM, Logistics people can access real-time data on inventory levels, product specifications, and sales trends, streamlining the order fulfillment process.

4. Customer Success Teams

PCM helps salespeople to engage with customers more confidently and close deals as they have access to accurate product information.

5. E-commerce Businesses

Companies selling on various e-commerce platforms like Amazon, eBay, Shopify, and their own websites need PCM to make sure the product information is consistent across all sales channels.

What is eCommerce product catalog management?

eCommerce product catalog management specifically revolves around the needs of online sellers. It refers to creating, updating, enriching, optimizing, and organizing product information. The product catalogs must be managed and organized in a structured fashion and must be comprehensive, error-free, and engaging. With such efforts, online sellers can improve the conversion rate by creating a better shopping experience for their customers.

Effective product catalog management is crucial for the success of an online store.

Are you Managing your Product Catalogs Effectively?

To evaluate how well you’re managing your product catalog, answer the following questions.

• Do you regularly update product information like names, descriptions, and prices?
• Is your product information consistent and error-free across all the sales channels?
• Do you categorize your products clearly to help the customers easily find what they want?
• Do you continuously monitor the performance of your product catalog and make improvements?
• Do you ensure that all product information complies with industry standards and regulations?

How did you score?

Mostly Yes: Your catalog management is likely on track. Keep up!

Mostly No: There might be room for improvement. Consider refining your approach for better results.

Importance of eCommerce product catalog management

✅A product catalog that is well-organized and managed enables ease of navigation, discoverability, and engagement for the customers. This enhances customer experience

✅Maintaining accurate and up-to-date product information reduces product returns and improves customer satisfaction

✅An optimized product catalog can improve search engine visibility and improve the chance of conversions

✅A well-managed product catalog can facilitate cross-selling and upselling by recommending related products, increasing the average order value

✅Managing catalogs for different regions or languages allows e-commerce businesses to expand into international markets 

Benefits of Product Catalog Management

✅Streamlines product management by grouping related items, improving clarity and reducing confusion.

✅Ensures consistency and accuracy of product information across all the channels.

✅Minimizes the errors in the product listings, reducing labor costs by eliminating the need for frequent corrections.

✅Speeds up time-to-market with easily accessible and well-organized product data enabling smoother product launches.

✅Enables easy update of products with a little effort saving both time and resources.

Challenges of product catalog management

✅Ensuring data accuracy

✅Maintaining product data consistency

✅Keeping product information up to date

✅Managing multiple variations of a product

✅Adapting catalogs for different regions and languages

✅Ensuring products are discoverable through search engines

✅Reducing manual catalog management tasks

Best practices of product catalog management

Let’s look at the five best practices of eCommerce product catalog management:

1. Make your catalogs comprehensive and engaging

Here are the key elements of your product catalog:

• Product title: The title is the first textual content that a potential buyer would read in a product catalog. You have to make it complete and engaging by including the product name, and brand, highlighting a key feature, and quantity

• Rich feature snippets and comprehensive descriptions: Explain what your product does, and why a customer should purchase it. Always put yourself in the perspective of the buyer and their address questions 

Ask yourself these questions before you write descriptions.

• Who is the product for?

Think through the target audience, gender, demographics, age, etc.

• What constitutes basic details? 

Attributes like dimensions, product features, and their functions.

• Why should a buyer choose you?

Highlight your USPs, features, and benefits.

Digital assets

Images fill in the gaps in the intangibility of the product. Hence, they have to be high in resolution and must cover all angles. You must also consider adding more resources like how-to videos, buying guides, brochures, and data sheets to elevate the customer experience.

Information on price, reviews, ratings

63% of consumers are more likely to purchase from a site if it has product ratings and reviews.

This means you cannot leave money on the table. As we are aware consumers tend to trust a product based on what other customers who have used the product think. You must always prompt your customer to leave a review or rating either on the product pages or as pop-ups post a sale.

2. Hit the refresh button when product data becomes stale

Bad data is information that is no longer accurate, useful, or meaningful. Bad data could be in any form; obsolete information, missing information, or misleading information. 

This has a ripple effect and affects the end customer. Bad data spread happens because of overlooking the need and necessity to spend time and effort refreshing it. In an attempt to sell more and stay profitable, data relevancy takes a toll leaving a long-term impact on the primitive profitability motive.

Additions to product information to keep buyers informed.

Customers visiting your product page would like to dig deep into every detail of information and they are full of questions. Your product data cannot cover them all, it shouldn’t. But, your product data must be updated and always relevant. 

The additions you make would certainly improve conversions. Sometimes it is not even about conversions. Keeping your customers aware of additional features or new versions saves them the time and hassle required for research. For instance, if you are a seller of Android phones, updating the latest version upgradability to a mobile helps buyers save time on extra research.

Let’s look at another use case where updating information improves customer experience. You cannot expect the entire target to be aware of your launches and upgrades. If they fail to learn your expansions through your marketing communications, product data is where you should have them covered.

Let’s say a makeup brand (Sephora) has introduced a new lipstick shade, this addition or enrichment should be a part of the product information to ensure your customers are on the same page of your launches and growth.

This holds good for obsolete information also. In the same example, for instance, if the beauty brand has stopped manufacturing a particular shade, then having it in the colors palette is stale data and enrichment is about removing wrong data too.

3. Write product catalog content that is engaging

Enriching is a holistic process. If your content is not originally written and in a tone that instantly connects with your customer, your product data won’t be helping you with conversions. You must avoid the reader’s autopilot, eliminate guesswork, and keep them engaged with your product copy.  Here’s an interesting copy from a cookie dough brand that sells these edibles on subscription. They’ve gone the extra mile to make the copy click with the customer:

Quick product data copywriting tips:

• Revoke to emotional appeal and maintain the tone of the brand
• Perform proofreading and editing at various levels to avoid errors
• Address what’s in it for the user. Be relatable and talk about the challenges and hassles faced by the customer
• Paint a picture for the user and empathize with what section of the audience will be using your product
• Avoid empty phrases that do not convey anything. Eliminate blandness in your copy and make information insightful
• Use sensory words if the product kind is such that it requires appealing to the emotions and engaging the user 
• You can always feature the creators of a new product or the story behind it to instigate belongingness

4. Make the purchase decision easier with digital assets

Digital assets make the purchase decision quick, give the look and feel of the product, and make the textual content interesting.

Images and videos

This is a handbag from Fossil. 

The work on digital asset creation is quite commendable here, they have images of every compartment giving an idea of how much you can fit in them. Also, the product information is well thought out.

They also have videos guiding you through how it’d look when you hang the sling bag on your shoulder. This makes purchase decisions easy. Texts cannot cover everything you want to convey. Images/ videos are a great way to communicate and give out a clear picture.

Check out the page and the video here. 

Videos need not necessarily be about the product. Apart from that you could also have additional ones that are insightful resources for your visitors that could be as a how-to video, or demonstration.

It could also be about other products under the same brand umbrella. Depending on which industry you belong to and what categories you sell, you must advise, be an influencer, and offer useful content to customers as customer experience is not just about moving towards conversions, but letting them hear the voice of the brand, the command, quality, and selfless love towards the clan that gives them business.

Here’s a quick checklist for optimizing images:

• Images should be high in resolution. The size of the main product image should be 600×600 pixels and go up to 2000 x 2000 pixels
• The secondary images must have the size of at least 450 x 450 pixels and up to 2000 x 2000 pixels
• The product image should cover up to 83% of the screen
• Zoom-in option and multi-dimensional views are a must-have
• The background of the image should be in white
• The image must be clear and not cropped

5. Automating product catalog management and reducing manual efforts

When you deal with hundreds of thousands of product catalogs, it’d become practically impossible to manage all the product information, both textual and digital content manually without the interference of automation.

You would encounter a variety of problems like:

• Spending hours on manually writing product catalogs
• Standardizing the catalogs to meet unique channel requirements
• Enriching the catalogs by filling the missing information and removing errors
• Writing catalogs in multiple languages 
• Strategize pricing and stay competitive
• Remove data discrepancies 

It’s always a best practice to overcome these challenges by managing product catalogs with the power of automation. A PIM can help you standardize, normalize, enrich, and syndicate product data effortlessly from a single platform.

Product Catalog Management Software Types

There are many types of catalog management software available in the market.

1. Cloud-based 

Cloud-based solutions offer great flexibility and scalability according to the unique and changing needs of a business. It also enables easy accessibility of the product catalogs from anywhere.

2. On-premise

On-premise solutions are installed locally on the company’s servers and computers providing more control and security. This requires significant in-house IT infrastructure for maintenance

3. Open-source

Open-source solutions are publicly accessible and can be modified easily to suit the specific needs. This requires technical expertise for set-up and customization.

4. SaaS (Software as a Service) 

SaaS-based solutions are completely managed by the software provider. They typically follow a subscription model billed on a monthly or annual basis.

Benefits of PIM as a Catalog Management Software

• Improves the quality of product catalogs with automated content enrichment features.
• Digital Assets such as images, videos, and PDFs can be stored under one roof with its DAM capabilities.
• Streamlines the process of updating and distributing product data across multiple channels, enabling faster time-to-market.
• Offers Reporting and Analytics features, giving more deeper insights into the performance of the product.
• Workflow management features make it easier for teams to collaborate by enabling revisions and approvals of product data.
• Data validation features help ensure the data is complete, accurate, and compliant with industry standards.

Final thoughts

Your product information goes through a lot of battles before it faces the customer. The journey is tiring as there is a series of searches, ranking, filtering, and clicking. In spite of all this, conversions could be a major hurdle. It is not easy to make customers clingy to your brand or products. To make that spark happen, you have got to obsess over giving your customers the best shopping experience. 

When it comes to a good shopping experience on the product information front, it depends on how easy you make buying decisions. Customers are on the lookout for an immersive and tailor-made experience that makes buying decisions hassle-free. This needs a lot of effort in fine-tuning your product information and we hope this guide has helped you understand the gaps in your data. 

You can prepare to give customers a memorable shopping experience by giving your product data a makeover – a three-step process: add essential elements, enrich information, and give away rich resources.

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