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If you are an eCommerce business, be happy to know that the odds are clearly in your favor.
The eCommerce sector was already booming when the pandemic gave it an additional boost of $183 billion — that’s almost equivalent to the 2020 holiday shopping season. A whopping $844 billion was spent online between March 2020 and February 2021.
As technology continues to dominate most aspects of our lives, it’s only natural that shopping for things is now a complete digital exercise.
Product catalog management for eCommerce businesses
Customers today have become extremely discerning and cautious in their buying decisions. They want to compare the costs and features of different brands and models before buying anything. And that’s why the accuracy of product data plays an important role in the buyer’s journey.
Before we get into the importance of catalog management, let’s understand a bit of basics first.
What is an eCommerce Product Catalog or Digital Catalog?
A product catalog looks just like a physical print catalog, except it’s digital.
In eCommerce, a product catalog is used to describe a product or set of products and their characteristics in a digital catalog format.
A digital catalog can have a range of products grouped together which have certain attributes in common.
Here’s an example of what a digital eCommerce catalog for beauty products looks like.
What is eCommerce product data?
Product data quality is a key deciding factor to eCommerce success. Accurate and updated information helps your product rank in Google, boosts customer buying decisions, and also lets you manage your inventory and operations better.
For both B2C and B2B eCommerce to thrive, your product data must be optimized for SEO, ease of site search and navigation, personalized product recommendation, warehouse and inventory management, and delivery operations.
A few examples for product data include:
For SEO: keywords used in page titles, page URLs, image titles, image alt tags, headers, navigation, internal links, meta title, and meta description
For a product: No duplication, updated prices, accurate product type, color, HTML tags, and content developed for product description that matches product images, and so on.
What is eCommerce Product Catalog Management?
Product Catalog Management for eCommerce businesses is a strategic process that enables upselling and cross-selling of products by managing product data present in your eCommerce product catalogs.
If your product data is managed in-house or by a third party, you still have to implement catalog management strategies for your eCommerce store.
Why is product catalog management important to eCommerce businesses?
Your product catalog powers your eCommerce store’s sales initiatives, marketing campaigns, and much more.
If your product catalog isn’t accurate and updated, it can impact your customer’s online shopping experience and ultimately impact your sales. A catalog that’s going to cut ice is the one that’s accurate, updated, and backed by seamless product catalog management.
How to solve the 5 challenges of eCommerce product catalogs?
It’s needless to say that product catalog management can be prone to errors and is time-consuming.
Here are the top five challenges faced by eCommerce businesses in product catalog management, and ways to overcome them.
1. Product launch
The Challenge — You have an upcoming product launch
Product catalog management is time-consuming, and you are never ready for the launch. This would be because of several reasons.
- There may be too many products to sell, you have no time to update every catalog or your supplier may have given you pieces of incomplete or inaccurate information.
- You may also have customers from all over the globe and you are running short of time to tend to specific product details.
- There might be discrepancies between designs and templates for the digital catalogs across your site which might work against your brand identity.
If you don’t have the right tools or a robust team, things can start falling apart soon after the launch.
The Solution — Find the right outsourcing partner
You may not always need external help. But sometimes when there’s a heavy workload, you’ve got to do what you’ve got to do! Take for example, during a sale season or festival, it helps to have an external partner to share the work.
An eCommerce platform service provider can update your product catalog data manually or by using catalog management software.
Some SaaS solution providers like ewiz Commerce also provide catalog management and automation services that reduce overhead and turnaround time. Apart from this, you also get a fully customized, ready-to-sell online store in 30 days.
It’s always better to first check with your platform provider before exploring individual or third-party service providers as they may not be as safe and reliable as you’d think.
2. Product tagging
The Challenge — Inaccurate product tagging leading to poor product discovery
You may have excellent top-of-the-line products, but what good are they if your customers cannot find them? It could be an LED bulb, or the antique brass doorknob lock, or that white flower pendant chandelier. How are they going to find what they are looking for anyway unless they are suitably tagged to be found?
The Solution — Find the right eCommerce automation tool
The best B2B eCommerce platforms have automation tools to automate product tagging. Some of these platforms, ewiz commerce, for instance, use AI to automate the entire product tagging process thanks to deep learning technology.
You can rely on these AI-powered platforms to suggest relevant product feature tags as well as titles and descriptions based on your product images, facilitating quick product discovery. By detecting the visual attributes of the product, an AI-powered product discovery suite can bridge the gap between you and your customers.
3. Inaccurate metadata
The Challenge — Inaccurate metadata leads to poor SEO discovery
Digitization can be painful and without the services of a smart digital agency, things like metadata creation, tagging, etc. may seem like a stretch.
Metadata ensures better search engine rankings giving customers a better chance to find your products online.
Metadata is keyword-rich and communicates information about your site to search engines. The right eCommerce platform will leverage metadata that will work behind the scenes to get you noticed and optimize your campaign.
The Solution — Find the right automation tool and partner
SEO is not just keywords. It also needs expertise and a strategy. So, if you don’t have the right person to manage this, it’s always better to hire an external digital agency/ consultant for this.
4. Inventory tracking
The Challenge — Manually tracking inventory in real-time
If you have a lot of SKUs, sold across multiple channels — digital, offline, eCommerce marketplaces, etc.; keeping track of the inventory becomes a hard task. And tracking it on a real-time basis is an impossible one.
If there is no mechanism to track your inventory regularly, it often creates a gap between demand and supply. This creates multiple issues like supply chain inefficiencies, poor customer buying experience, etc. Not a good sign.
The Solution — Integrate your platform with an ERP:
Seamless integration between your eCommerce platform and ERP will help you keep track of inventory across multiple locations. This exchange of data will happen on a real-time basis, and you will always have the right inventory details at your fingertips.
5. Pricing
The Challenge — Analyzing competitor pricing can be quite a task
You may want to offer discounts on certain products or reward high-value customers. Besides, you will also have to factor in competitor pricing to ensure that all your products are correctly priced.
With online shopping, customers have time to compare your products and those of your competitors to know who’s got a better deal. Customers are most likely to go with the one that offers the lowest price. You just cannot afford to go wrong here.
The Solution — Have dynamic pricing on your eCommerce store
The modern eCommerce platforms come with pricing automation tools to help you change prices on the go or alter them based on the market situation to give you an edge over your competitors.
Carve your niche with robust product catalog management
Product catalog management serves different purposes for different verticals, but the core underlying message remains the same — providing detailed information about your products to drive business and improve the overall customer experience.
It’s not about one particular product/ brand/ industry; but about creating a thriving ecosystem where everybody gets what they need easily. Product catalogs do exactly this — creating seamless customer experiences across a very diverse eCommerce landscape.
It is important to have well-designed digital catalogs that can strike a chord with customers while enhancing brand stickiness. We need catalogs that can be pushed through a solid eCommerce platform that adapts to changing contexts and geographies. The one that can give real-time visibility into the inventory, can sense the beat of your customers, and advise you with the right insights.
We believe eCommerce businesses now need to leverage product catalogs for:
- Getting access to more customer data
- Seeking opportunities to build customer loyalty
- Saving costs with a competitive eCommerce platform
- Going omnichannel and exploring ways to upsell and cross-sell
- Personalizing the shopping experience
With the right eCommerce platform and a robust catalog management strategy, you can level up your game in the eCommerce market in no time.
Optimize your catalogs with ewiz commerce
ewiz commerce is your one-stop solution for your eCommerce catalog requirements. We offer AI-powered eCommerce platforms as well as eCommerce services to help you out with all your eCommerce needs.
Some of our product catalog-related offerings:
- AI-powered eCommerce platform with automation
- Catalog management services
- AI-powered email/ catalog marketing platform
Call us today to explore over 100 features for your unique business objectives, including creating engaging digital catalogs.
