Introduction
In this first-paced digital world, handling an effective product catalog for your e-commerce business is of utmost importance. Nowadays, businesses are striving their best to serve their customers better than ever in all possible terms. One of the most common ways of making your website optimal and user-friendly is maintaining e-commerce catalog management. Starting from keeping inventory on track to shipping, packaging, delivery to the customers are the huge responsibilities that e-commerce companies have to do. Not to mention, having a successful e-commerce catalog management strategy will make your business earn maximum profit and enhanced customer loyalty.
Why is E-commerce Product Catalog Important?
Information about the products you are selling on your website is the crux of the business. Product catalog management is the most vital business essence that e-commerce companies have to maintain without fail. Failing to update product lists on the website will lead to lower sales and customers will not be interested in buying the products. A successful e-commerce product catalog acts as the foundation of improved online shopping experiences of customers such as site navigation, site search, confidence to purchase, product recommendations, search engine optimization, and so on.
5 Common Challenges of E-commerce Product Catalog Management
In order to create and manage your e-commerce catalog management, you should be aware of the common problems that you might encounter during the time of updating product information on your website. Below are the lists of a few common challenges of e-commerce product catalog management that brands face frequently.
1. Updating product Lists Regularly
To provide your customers a seamless shopping experience, you must update your product list regularly. Whether it is the prices or the inventory or the features of the products or their uses, adding new products, improving product descriptions, brands must conduct these tasks regularly. To make the e-commerce company more successful, managing the product catalog is crucial so that customers don’t miss any important product details.
2. Managing Products in All Sales Channel
Another common challenge that most e-commerce companies face is being able to manage omnichannel customer strategy that finally leads to a lack of ability to sell their products throughout all customer channels. It means that the company has to maintain more product logs across all the sales channels. Each of the online sales channels has a variety of requirements and the lack of uniformity will make the product listings more different.
3. Handling Complex Product Descriptions
Few product ranges have a much more complex product description than the other range of products on the website. Depending on the category and the product niche, there are a plethora of data structures that need to be incorporated without making it more complicated to understand by the customers. It should be done in a way so that customers can easily select their products whenever they decide to buy from your brand. Brands should focus on the strategy of e-commerce catalog management that includes handling complex product descriptions.
4. Expanding Product Catalog
As time goes, your e-commerce business will flourish and so will the number of products and categories that will also increase in the future. Make sure that whenever you are starting to use product catalogs, technologies must be used that can handle multiple categories and huge product lists. An unorganized and incompetent product catalog will hamper your website that will eventually crash your site. It can create a headache for the business as it will take a lot of time to update the new product categories manually and there will be chances of making errors which is certainly not good for business growth.
5. Maintaining Quality of Data
No company would want to hear from their customers that their product information is inaccurate, misleading, or not helpful at all. It will happen if the details of the product listing are not matching with the products the company is actually selling. If a buyer can order a product and receives a different product that does not match the product that is indicated on the listing, then the customer will definitely put bad reviews against your brand. It is a kind of e-commerce catalog management error that most online brands face.
5 Effective Strategies for E-commerce Product Catalog Management
Now, when you know the issues you may encounter while maintaining the product catalog, as a brand you should know the ways of avoiding these issues by implementing effective e-commerce catalog management strategies.
1. Trust Building with Customers
To run an online business successfully, building trust with the customers is very important. Trust goes both ways, the buyer is trusting the seller to provide an authentic product and the seller is expecting that the buyer will pay for the product once they receive it. Through e-commerce catalog management, you can maintain your brand reputation by adding relevant product information to the website. It will help in eliminating the negative reviews from the customer’s side.
2. Categorize and Tag Product Catalog
Now you can tag and categorize your product properly on the website that will improve the customer experience. You can take advantage of the available categorization options which are offered by all e-commerce platforms. It will not only help the buyers with what they are looking for but also you can track the products easily. While implementing e-commerce catalog management, you can check whether your products are tagged consistently across the website and optimize the categorization part.
3. Select Proper Catalog Management Tool
Choosing a proper e-commerce catalog management tool as per your business requirements is crucial for managing your product on the website. There are a plethora of tools available in the market such as spreadsheet software, downloadable software, browser-based software, PIM (product information management) systems. Implementing appropriate tools will help in serving your customers in a seamless manner. The product management tool will allow the brand in scaling and managing the product catalog.
4. Practice Cross-selling and Up-selling
Upselling and cross-selling are important for an e-commerce company to attract more customers to its website. This will not only increase the sales but also it will help the customers in choosing the right products or related products they are buying. Sometimes, you can offer a better product based on the customer requirement that is costly as well as creates value to the customers. In this way, you can personalize the feed of the customer whenever he will visit your website thus improving e-commerce catalog management.
5. Mapping the Product Catalog Management Process
Managing huge lists of products in the product catalog can be overwhelming because it needs constant updates of the product list such as the addition of new products, categories, tagging, product description, shipping, etc. A process map should be created as a part of the e-commerce catalog management strategy to keep a track of the changes that are made in the product catalog so that everybody is responsible for making product catalog changes.
The Bottom Line
The success of your e-commerce catalog management lies in how you identify the challenges that you may encounter while updating the product catalogs and how efficiently you tackle those issues. There is literally no one-size-fits-all solution to your product catalog management challenges. But if you implement the above-mentioned e-commerce catalog management strategies in your company, you will definitely find consistency in solving your challenges. Always use a product information management system that tracks all records and changes that occurred in the system so that you can track the mistakes that have been done while making changes in the product catalog system.
