Online shopping is a common and widely growing phenomenon that provides its customers with the ease of shopping at their fingertips. As most people choose online shopping over in-store shopping, the competition is fierce for ecommerce companies. The biggest challenge for online brands and retailers is ensuring customers see their products and walk further down the purchase funnel. And the most effective way to achieve higher sales is to have a captivating virtual storefront. Your focus should be creating top-notch product catalogs for your ecommerce store that allow a smooth customer experience.
Let’s say you need to purchase some sauce and go to a grocery store. But you find the products in the jams and sauces section disorganized and without proper labels. Would you stay and buy the item? The same principle applies in the world of ecommerce.
Having detailed and well-structured product catalogs is crucial for your ecommerce growth. However, many online businesses struggle to manage their catalogs effectively due to the sheer volume of products and the data intricacies. While catalog management is time-consuming and effort-intensive, it can be the strongest and most effective strategy to win a large chunk of the market share.
What is Product Catalog Management?
Catalog management is definitely not as straightforward as the term sounds. The process involved in creating and maintaining product catalogs is quite elaborate. We need to collect the product data from online sources, which could be from the manufacturer, brand website, or third-party site. The collected data is then structured into marketplace or channel-specific formats. Once the product catalogs are updated with complete and accurate product information, the product data is then syndicated to relevant product listings across multiple channels.
Due to the complexity of the data, it is difficult to manage product data in one place without a catalog management solution. Moreover, manually making product information changes to the catalogs and listings is challenging and error-prone. Automating catalog management solves all these critical problems while being accurate, effortless, and quick.
Why is Catalog Management the key to a winning ecommerce strategy?
Catalog management is critical for ecommerce businesses because it directly affects the customer journey. We know how a poorly managed catalog leads to confusion, frustration, and results in cart abandonment. In comparison, a well-structured and detailed ecommerce catalog makes shopping more convenient and drives customers to purchase.
Catalog management not only takes care of what happens after a shopper lands on your product listing but also ensures that shoppers see your listings in the top search results. Online product catalogs need to be optimized for search engines so they drive maximum traffic to your listings and website. Catalog management allows for seamless keyword optimizations on a regular basis.
Ecommerce sales result from various critical factors like product pricing, quality, brand image, etc. Engaging and updated product listings are one of the factors that can make or break sales. So, through this blog, let’s explore the top 7 strategies to revamp your product catalog and boost overall sales.
Top 7 Strategies to revamp your product catalogs
1. Asses Your Product Information Sources
The first question you must ask yourself while revamping ecommerce catalogs is, where is the product information coming from? Since product data is collected from multiple sources, you must ensure it is about the exact product in question. Discrepancies in product descriptions, pricing, or availability information can cost you sales.
A catalog management solution will be useful here as one does not need to audit the product data sources manually. Powerful algorithms will accurately compare and match products on competitor and manufacturer sites before pulling the relevant data for your catalog. This enables easy syndication of product content onto different platforms. Content syndication is a great strategy to ensure your product listings are consistent across multiple ecommerce platforms.
2. Clean Up Product Descriptions and Other Data
One of the quickest ways to optimize your ecommerce product catalog is to clean up your product descriptions. Check if your existing product descriptions are complete and engaging. They must include important information like dimensions, material, color, features, etc, to enable shoppers to make informed decisions.
Again, a catalog management solution will prove useful here as you can automate periodic health checks of your product catalog. This way, you can find products with incomplete or outdated information and optimize them to ensure high-quality catalogs. Additionally, you can leverage marketplace SEO to include relevant keywords in your product listings to boost search engine rankings and traffic.
3. Display High-Quality Images and Videos
Most people love to visualize things that they want. It can be anything from buying the latest phone to a new piece of furniture. They want to know how it would actually look in their hand or the home. So, having high-quality images and videos of the products will help shoppers visualize better and build trust, driving sales.
Additionally, consider including user-generated content like product reviews and photos of the products after being bought to instill confidence in shoppers.
4. Optimize For Mobile Shoppers
Today, many ecommerce shoppers use mobile to purchase online. If you are an ecommerce business struggling with low traffic, you might want to check if your product catalogs are optimized for mobile devices. Usually, brands and retailers are more focused on desktop devices and often overlook mobile responsiveness and faster loading times.
And it’s not just about delivering a seamless experience to mobile shoppers. It’s about ensuring your online product catalog functions efficiently on every device. You can cater to a wider target audience, ultimately boosting your traffic and sales.
5. Build Perfect Catalog Taxomony and Categories
If you are wondering how the catalog taxonomy plays a role in making your product catalogs convert, imagine this: You walk into a store to purchase a nail gun, but as you walk around the aisles, you cannot locate the utility section as the signs are missing. How long would you stay in the store searching for the section that has nail guns? Similarly, shoppers must be able to navigate a website for products straightforwardly, or they will abandon the search.
There are ecommerce taxonomy experts who can audit your existing product taxonomy and recommend a clear, well-structured taxonomy that allows for intuitive navigation.
6. Apply Data and Analytics
Ecommerce businesses need to leverage data and analytics when thinking about revamping product catalogs. How does it help? Well, firstly, if you are already thinking about making changes to your catalogs, you must know their current performance. Using data will offer you insights into what needs to be improved. Secondly, revamping the product catalog is not a one-time task. They need continuous monitoring and improvement.
Data and analytics will enable you to identify your best-selling products, monitor conversions, and gauge user interaction. This kind of information is key to finding the problem areas within your catalogs and addressing them promptly. Especially if you have product listings on multiple platforms, analytics can simplify the process of tracking performance and driving data-driven decisions.
7. Explore Catalog Management Solutions
Managing product catalogs manually will not help a business to scale quickly and efficiently. It costs more, takes more time and effort, and yet does not generate expected results. However, if you take the route of automation, you will not only save time and money but also ensure 100% accuracy in product data.
The right catalog management solution will allow you to centralize your product data, making it seamless to update and maintain your online product catalog across various channels. It will also help streamline content syndication, ensuring that your product information is consistent on every platform.
Final Thoughts
Revamping ecommerce product catalogs is an effective way to improve your sales and revenue while making customers happy. A robust catalog management solution will make this process smooth and quick by enabling data centralization, automating enrichment, and powering content syndication. Furthermore, it will make implementation of these strategies a breeze, and you will be able to achieve long-term growth.
Take the first step to boost your sales.
