March 12, 2020 
The retailing business landscape is undergoing a rapid paradigm shift. Technological advancements and breakthrough innovations have been instrumental behind this shift.
Besides, this shift can be attributed to the changing customer expectations too. Today’s customers are looking for seamless, custom, and personalized buying experiences. To meet this evolving demand, retailers have to up their game.
Overview
Today’s customers are rapidly switching from the brick-and-mortar store to the eCommerce apps for checking out products before actually making the buying decision. Being enabled with latest technologies and digital platforms, their buying decisions are highly influenced by the online reviews and digital word-of-mouth.
They are looking for all information about the product they intend to buy at one central place rather than switching between different websites. With business expansion comes the challenge of an ever-expanding product portfolio.
Managing the expanding product portfolio may warrant extensive investments in terms of time, and resources and might overwhelm the retail brands. Here comes the role of eCommerce product catalog management.
What is eCommerce product catalog management?
A product catalog management can be essentially described as the strategic approach of organizing, standardizing and publishing product information across the array of sales outlets in real-time.
This plays a vital role in ensuring consistent customer experience by making accurate, and reliable product information accessible, 24*7 to the customers and end-users.
Significance of PCM
Product catalog systems are highly essential for the retail brands to cater to the evolving customer demands for accurate, reliable and real-time product-related information across multiple devices or platforms of choice.
A robust and efficient product catalog system is the absolute solution to cater to this.
Merits of using a Product Catalog System
To Deliver Consistent Customer Experience
Ensuring customer satisfaction has been the motto for businesses. Customer experience is crucial in making or breaking a business. Thus, retails and eCommerce businesses must ensure consistency and accuracy of their product information across the multitude of sales channels and platforms to deliver seamless and personalized customer experiences.
Though ensuring product content consistency manually may seem overwhelming, a robust Product Catalog Management system will turn the tables in favor of the retail brands.
Customers might browse a product on an online market place and may navigate to the business website for further information to help them in making a reliable purchase decision. Product Catalog solutions can assist businesses in efficiently managing their product-related information in a centralized hub, making it accessible round-the-clock as well as ensuring the accuracy and reliability of product information in the real-time.
Product catalog management systems collate the enterprise data within a centralized repository to provide complete access & visibility to businesses via a unified interface that enables them to respond quickly to market changes.
To Boost Business ROI
With business expansion, retail brands often worry about managing their ever-growing product portfolio. However, with a robust product catalog management system, this does not remain a challenge.
Product catalog management systems play a pivotal role in improving the growth perspective and ROI for the retailers. It enables retailers to ensure efficiency and lesser time-to-market their products.
Customizing the Product Catalogs according to the Market Place
Shopping experience has been crucial and will remain crucial in the times to come. However, retail brands must think beyond offering a rich and consistent customer experience. The gen-Z customers look for consistent product information irrespective of their mode of product surfing, be it digitally or physically in a brick-and-mortar store.
Conflicting or irrelevant product information in terms of the product image, description or price can negatively affect the customers’ experience and product perception. Moreover, it may discourage their buying decision.
A robust product catalog management system plays a vital role here. It makes it easy to keep product information accurate, relevant and customized as per the guidelines of the concerned market place. Updated, digital product assets are critical to delivering meaningful and seamless customer experiences across the distributed eCommerce landscape.
Categorizing Products in an Easy & Efficient Manner
Managing the entire product portfolio information can be daunting, time and resource-intensive task for the retail brands, inventory supervisors and personnel. Poor product categorization may harshly impact the order processing. This may cause disappointments and inconveniences at the customer front. As a result, the retail brands may lose their loyal customers and repeat businesses.
Difficulty in accessing relevant product data may prolong or even alter the customer’s buying decision and businesses may end up losing a potential opportunity. However, a robust product catalog management system ensures that the above challenges are taken care of.
A well-organized and intelligent product catalog system enables the customers to explore the products online with ease and optimizes their buying experience.
Challenges
Product catalog management is highly essential for retail brands to survive and strive in the ever-changing business landscape. However, there are certain challenges associated with them that may limit their efficiency. They are:
- Today’s customers have shifted from desktop-only applications to multi-device and multi-screen usage. Products that are accessible across multiple marketing platforms and devices may improve the sales opportunity. However, it is easier said than done. In principle, sales channels have different guidelines, policies and processes for product cataloguing.
- eCommerce retailers may encounter the challenge of optimizing their product catalog to meet the guidelines of the sales channels. This is also associated with secondary challenges such as inconsistency in product content across channels and frequent updates related to the products such as the changes in price, the addition of new features, etc.
Conclusion
Efficient product catalog management services help optimize time and cost in managing massive product data while ensuring accurate, standardized and consistent product information across channels.
Product catalog management goes beyond simply building and managing product data across multiple sales channels. A robust product catalog management software is vital to ensure higher business growth and ROI.
It might be a challenge for businesses to select the right product catalog management system when they are faced with a multitude of options. If you are looking for a hassle-free and quick solution, turn to the experts at Vinculum, today!
