March 14, 2018 
In the fierce competition of eCommerce retailing, brands can no longer afford to ignore catalogue management. Online shoppers want consistent and correct information about the product instantly.
Here you’ll get to know what eCommerce Product Catalogue is, and what are the challenges faced in eCommerce Catalogue Management. After reading this article, you will have a good idea of how you can improve your current Product Catalogue Management in order to turbocharge your sales.
What is eCommerce Product Catalogue?
An eCommerce Product Catalogue is simply a database of the products a brand wants to sell. It usually consists of information like SKU, Images of the product, Brand Name, Price, MSRP, Quantity Available, Dimensions, Category, Features and Description etc.
In the era of eRetailing, Catalogue management is an integrated aspect of eCommerce. Without creating correct Product Catalogue, it is impossible to start an eCommerce business. However, managing and keeping the consistency in this database can be a tedious task and is highly prone to human error, especially if you are selling on multiple channels.
Here are 3 challenges every seller has to face while managing eCommerce Product Catalogue
- Selling across multiple channels: Any merchant who sells on multiple channels will agree that uploading and managing catalogue across multiple marketplaces simultaneously is the biggest challenge they face. To meet the customer requirements and to make your customers confident enough that they are buying exactly what they need, you must list your product with complete and consistent information across channels. It can be really tedious, messy and time-consuming to meet the data standards of multiple marketplaces simultaneously. For example, Amazon has different image standards and product categories from eBay. And, how you list your product on eBay must be different from how you list on Lazada. Without the help of right tools, it is nearly impossible for the brands to manage catalogue and maintain the consistency across multiple channels.
- Merchandising: When it comes to product information, customers are highly demanding, they want high quality, crisp and accurate information about the product they want to buy. To merchandise, the catalogue sellers need to follow a multitudinous process to make their product information customer-ready. It becomes more rigorous to do this for multiple channels.
- Catalogue Scalability and Keeping the Data consistent: Keeping the uploaded data consistent, is undoubtedly a challenge if there are multiple channels involved. Errors like inaccuracy, spelling mistakes, missing attributes, etc., are bound to happen due to manual intervention involved in catalogue management process. And, when the product catalogue is already a mess it becomes more difficult to add more SKUs. This is a challenge for brands to add more products. Thence, it discourages them to scale up their catalogue.
These are the 3 major challenges brands deal with while managing their eCommerce Product Catalogue. To overcome these challenges they should be more concerned towards making the product information as their top priority.
However, with the right tools, dealing with these problems can be easy. A good eCommerce Catalogue Management System can streamline these tasks for you and reduce your manual effort by 80% in keeping the information consistent across multiple channels.
To know more about how a Catalogue Management System can help turbocharging your eCommerce business you can request a demo now!
If you still have any queries regarding Catalogue Management System feel free to use the comments section below.
