How to Manage your Product Catalog Effectively?

Choosing the fate of purely eCommerce retailer you can save you time and money eliminating the need to merchandize you products, setting them out in the most attractive way possible in a brick-and-mortar shop, but it doesn’t mean that you can fill in the warehouse and sleep safely. Online product catalog and its management is one of the crucial issues you have to deal with properly if you don’t want to be buried under your own products someday.

Being both, retailer on the one hand and the customer on the other, I guess everyone realizes the power of feeling the product in your own hands. This is, probably, the only substantial disadvantage of web stores in comparison to their “real” peers. However, the smartest internet retailers solve this problem very successfully by working hard on creating the best product catalog they can.

Your catalog is your face

A comprehensive and user-friendly catalog can substitute the desire to touch the product by providing full information, detailed characteristics, all the necessary purchase details and, of course, high resolution images of your products, shot from different angles. Detailed and well-organized product catalog can encourage your visitors to buy, in other words, achieve your ultimate goal.

Instead of displaying the only product that is requested by the visitor, you can recommend to look at the associated goods and other similar options, doubling or tripling your chances for success. In order to make all these options available to your customers, first you should configure your catalog internally, the way you feel comfortable to work with. Sounds like a lot of job, doesn’t it? However, modern eCommerce solutions are ready to help you, offering handy tools for managing your product catalog, immensely increasing the time efficiency of this process.

Intuitive catalog, configured to highlight the best of your offering will bring your brand to the new level, becoming your main business tool.

At least, count to ten

A webstore product catalog is not just a notepad with some odd bits of information. It is a fully –structured instrument that will help you to manage the inventory, store and analyze data, as well as to optimize your website in general.

Surely, you can be creative and add some unique features to your catalog, but don’t forget to point out the first five:

1. Mention your product title and inventory number or model.
2. Build a comprehensive product hierarchy ‒ develop the system of product categories and sub-categories.
3. Add a short description, for those who prefer to look rather than to read, continued by a longer description for the most demanding customers.
4. Upload high-quality images of your product, covering its best features and peculiarities.
5. Never lie about the PRICE, because there is nothing more irritating than sellers, trying to hide or postpone the moment, revealing the actual product price.

These are, undoubtedly, the first five, but there are more options worth your attention. Managing your product catalog, you can add the alternative product variants, related opportunities and customer reviews that will strengthen your brand awareness.

Creating your catalog you can start with a minimum of columns, gradually upgrading it according to the customers’ needs and your own business insight. Today you have plenty opportunities to choose any eCommerce solution that will help you to manage any kind of inventory you deal with. If to look at the statistics, provided by BulltWith, you’ll see that eCommerce platforms’ market is rather diverse, in other words, you have plenty of professional solutions by your side that won’t let you down in your struggle to build a perfect online product catalog and achieve incredible business success.

Today online retailers develop different kinds of tools and specific functionality, willing to satisfy the demanding customers’s needs. Magento, WooCommerce, Shopify ‒ you’d better choose your own partner that will do all the dirty work for you, providing you with the opportunity to build the most easy-to-use and comprehensive online product catalogs ever.

Author:

Alexandra Pankratyeva

Alexandra is a marketing specialist and a professional translator. For the last five years she’s been writing corporate blogs, website content and analytical articles on e-Commerce, technology solutions, etc. for different companies, including Amasty.