Online selling and marketing products is a really tough task. With numerous other retailers offering a similar product range at competitive prices, customers are not easy to attract and engage these days. Therefore, making your presence felt demands a lot of hard work and dedication. In such a scenario, planning and managing an online retail catalog can be a great help.
Online retail catalog management is the process of managing a product catalog to ensure its highest quality across all channels. This includes organizing, standardizing, and publishing your product data. The most crucial part of this catalog is maintaining the accuracy of product details.
While e-commerce product catalog management might seem easy to many, it actually is a complex task due to reasons like the scalability of the product catalog, maintaining data consistency and quality, etc. Apart from these, a number of other challenges may act as a hurdle in online product catalog management.
To simplify this process, we share a few simple tips that may help retailers counter these challenges and better manage their online product catalogs. Read on to learn more.
Table of Contents
- Validate All Product-Related Information
- Maintain Uniformity in Displaying Product-Related Information
- Deploy Product Information Management System (PIMS)
- Smartly Define Your Website’s Structure
- Make it SEO-Friendly
- Create a Successful Online Store
Validate All Product-Related Information
For hassle-free online product catalog management, it is important to be sure about the information you have declared about your products online, such as their ASIN, UPC, or Part Number. This can be done by validating and cross-checking the product-related information you have with the details about your inventory in stock. Having all this information accurately in place can help a lot in minimizing product returns and replacements and also assist you in building a good brand reputation.
Maintain Uniformity in Displaying Product-Related Information
A user browsing an e-commerce website is likely to place an order only when its UI is user-friendly and easy to navigate. No customer would ever place an order with a business that irritates them or makes them feel frustrated. To offer your website visitors a user-friendly experience, all you need to do is ensure that the information on your website is well-managed and placed uniformly. This, in turn, would not only improve your website’s bounce rate but would also allow them to find what they have been looking for.
Deploy Product Information Management System (PIMS)
Investing in a Product Information Management System (PIMS) is a great idea to simplify product catalog management. The PIMS facilitates centralizing, managing, and enlisting products on multiple online sales channels. It also assists retailers in standardizing their product data using various robust tools, hence saving them a lot of time.
The PIMS also prevents the problem of managing multiple spreadsheets across different departments. Assisting in resolving the data quality problems, the PIMS also provides an ease of listing the same products across multiple channels.
Smartly Define Your Website’s Structure
Using mega menus on your website can be a great idea if you have a large product catalog. However, this won’t be effective if you have limited products to offer to your customers. This is because categorizing your product range can prevent customers from exploring new products or even looking at the products they might buy. Therefore, it is recommended first to comprehend your business size carefully and then define your online product catalog’s categories.
Making parent categories with multiple sub-categories can be a great way to let your customers know about your offered product range. It is also important to make sure that the parent categories created by you are clickable and direct users to a page that has multiple product options. Allowing your users to better filter their search results on the basis of factors like product material and style can also be a great way to improve their experience.
Make it SEO-Friendly
Plagiarism is one of the major issues that may create trouble in managing the online product catalog. This can be due to several factors, such as using the same copy for multiple product descriptions, replicating the product description from another website, and listing one product under multiple categories and sub-categories.
To simplify the management of this online product catalog, it is recommended that you avoid any such mistakes and publish fresh content for every product listed. Also, make sure that the content uploaded is SEO-friendly, which may help improve its ranking in Google search results.
Create a Successful Online Store
If you are a retailer who manages your business and sells your product range online, you have complete control over your customer experience and brand reputation. Whether it is about the ways in which your products are presented in the market or sharing information about an ongoing sale, better management of your online catalog always helps.
It is also important to remember that a well-managed online catalog for your retail store can help you earn a lot of revenue. Therefore, never compromise on the quality of the online product catalog, and you are all set to win the market.
