In this digital era, customers are tech-savvy, intellectual, and experienced in online shopping. Hence, it is arduous to convince them to shop something from an online shop.
Nowadays, customer’s expectations of online shopping and products are high. And for an eSeller to reach those expectations of each customer is onerous. However, a well-designed, cunning, and flawless product catalog on the storefront can discern the mystery of customer expectations.
A premium quality ecommerce product listing can influence customer minds firmly. When customer minds are positive and firm, they get an obvious way to move forward to purchase. This process isn’t easy. You need to cease the confusion and concerns of customers on your product catalog to get the way clear.
This article is all about the challenges of product catalog management and how efficiently you can address them. After reading this article, you will get an outlook on product catalog management and refinements your catalog needs.
What Is Product Catalog Management in eCommerce and Why Does It Matter?
A product catalog in an eCommerce business is referred to as a database of products that precisely portray what products a company or brand is selling. This catalog features complete product details like SKU, title, brand name, image, price, quantity, description, customer reviews, etc.
Besides, product catalogs of your store on the internet have to be easily accessible to your prospective customers. Therefore, an adequately organized catalog is the best approach to reach your targeted audience closer.
It is impractical to launch an eCommerce store without a proper product catalog. Customers rely on these catalogs before they purchase anything. It is said that properly organized catalogs could certainly impact customers to buy products without a second thought and prior interaction with eSeller.
Having a properly organized product catalog management results in:
- Buoyant customer experience: Since they can easily navigate the store to discover their anticipated product choices, it gives your customers a buoyant shopping experience and better conversions to you.
- Exceptional traffic: When your catalog is SEO optimized and organized, your products will be presented on top of customer searches. You get outstanding traffic to your store through consistent impact on search engines.
- Timely brand awareness: When products are streamlined smartly according to changing trends on time, it can provide better brand awareness among your target audience to drive traffic.
- Improved sales through value-added feature recommendations: Through cross-selling, upselling, and related product features, you get business and revenue growth. This provides eSellers a faster time to market their products.
Besides accuracy, finality, and data quality, the product data in the catalog should correspond with market trends, demands, and fluctuations. Moreover, it should consistently blend with your business strategies. But eCommerce businesses still struggle to display relevant, accurate, and timely catalogs.
eCommerce businesses have to deal with thousands of products, and it requires good back-office work to handle those products before it reaches customers. In addition, eCommerce businesses sell products across multiple sales channels, and marketplaces make this selling process more complicated as they require marketplace-compatible and accurate product data.
And here comes the importance of steady and well-organized catalogs. Conversely, An inaccurate, distorted and inconsistent catalog will annoy customer shopping experience, and further, it multiplies customer discontentment.
Moreover, it weakens your business too. Hence, as an eSeller, it is the need of the moment to become aware of various challenges and provocations that might occur on managing product catalogs that push eSellers to deep analyze and refurbish their business with innovative thoughts.
We point them out here for controlling those challenges effectively for massive business growth. So, let’s have a look into it.
Challenges Involved in Managing Product Catalogs
- Data inconsistency and imprecisions
Having a large volume of product data entry on the product catalog isn’t easy to manage. There are chances of data inconsistencies and imprecisions to happen on those product catalogs. Besides, inconsistent and imprecise data on your product catalog across distinct sales channels and marketplaces will lead to higher customer dissatisfaction and diminished sales and revenue.
- Constant product catalog upgrading
The eCommerce industry is wavering to dynamic upgrades every single minute. For example, there might be new tax rules, new regulations, product prices, packing criteria, etc., introduced. Hence, those up-gradation criteria need to apply to product catalogs on the eCommerce stores accordingly. Those eCommerce businesses that fail to incorporate those changes are liable for a penalty and other strict procedures.
- Difficulty to cope with multi-channel product data criteria.
ECommerce businesses expand their product selling over multiple eCommerce channels for better customer acquisition and sales. However, every sales channel has certain criteria, standards, or requirements to update products. Unfortunately, some eCommerce stores are unaware of these, and they have difficulty coping with these criteria.
- Supplier Data standardization issues
The product data forwarded from the supplier might not orient with your listing needs sometimes. They might not align the data in the proper format. If this has not happened correctly, data standardization error occurs, and data inconsistency appears on product catalogs when customers visit your store.
- The complexity of the product catalog reduces the time to market.
eCommerce stores require frequent product updates with new arrivals for business growth. It takes a reasonable amount of time for product updates at regular intervals. The challenge here is, these specific updates and their complexity for product catalog management reduces your time to market your products.
- Catalog expansion for business scaling
eCommerce businesses tend to expand their business after a particular period. Here catalog expansion should be well organized and precise to get benefit from this. And it’s a tedious task to reorganize the product catalog again. If not done by experienced ones, it might take a couple of months. A messy and disordered catalog will not help you expand your business; it disheartens your business.
- Misplaced attribute values impact product searches
Products are often designated with their attribute values to have a significant impact on product discovery. And, misplaced attribute values impact product searches negatively. For example, when attributed values are misplaced in the product catalog, product searches appear according to that. Thus, customers turn out buying products that are neither original nor demanded, which increases product return rates and reduces sales. Also, it affects store dignity.
- Product Price Matters
Product price on the catalog matters a lot, and it should be double scrutinized to avoid inapposite and inaccurate pricing that could impact customer acquisitions. In addition, customers explore the product price of different stores before they purchase anything.
Hence, marketplace research and competitor price analysis could be carried out to determine the business trends and profitable price range before presenting your products on the storefront to get better sales and revenue. However, this analysis becomes time-consuming when you have a vast number of products in your catalog.
Read More About : Importance of E-commerce Product Catalog Management Services
Addressing The Challenges
With the above-discussed challenges, you might have thought this product catalog management process can’t be handled individually. It is a tedious task. And it requires an expert’s involvement.
You can upgrade your spreadsheets or can use ERP or catalog-management tools to address the challenges. Still, outsourcing product catalog management sticks out as the best option.
At Intellect Outsource, we supply accurate and perfect product catalog services at a modest cost without compromising quality. Besides, we can present a compelling and efficient product catalog on your storefront to win customer minds instantly.
Get expert solutions from Intellect Outsource to all your eCommerce business requirements within a blink of an eye. Let us serve you to reach the sky of success.