December 17, 2020 
With online shopping and eCommerce taking huge leaps in the latest technology, customers are highly focused on their user experience to decide which platform and merchants they give business to. As an eCommerce site user, they expect rich text for product descriptions so they know exactly everything necessary about the product. A refined and dedicated product catalogue helps customers reinforce confidence in your brand to make their purchase without any reservations.
Today, we’ll be looking into why all eCommerce merchants need product catalogue management and what it does for the new Google User Experience update.
What does eCommerce Product Catalogue Management mean?
Product catalogue management for e-commerce refers to the process of managing eCommerce product catalogs strategically to standardize the quality of your product data across multiple sales channels. For instance, a garment merchant can have a dedicated product data for each of their outfits to be used uniformly on multiple ecommerce platforms. This entails the manner in which merchants curate, standardize, and publish their product description on each and every sales platform. Oftentimes merchants either have in-house content teams to create a database for all their products to be distributed to all the sales channels; however, if found more beneficial and economical, they can hand over the said task to third-party organizations as it is a complex process involving SEO tactics and optimization.
Why is it difficult?
Product catalogue management can be considered a simple enough task if one knows how to go about it. However, it is a tough task for merchants with thousands of products to standardize their product catalogue for several reasons, as mentioned below:
Types of products
A wide range of product can make your SKU management more intricate due to complexities such as:
- Product options: A matrix or variance of product segregated into families or categories based on attributes such as the occasion, size, color, pattern, fabric and more variables. For instance, a garment could be available in several sizes and colors, making it a complex process while adding such filters on the eCommerce channels.
- Assembly: Some of these products are sold individually but can be assembled into an end product. For instance, a customizable piece of kitchen fixture where every part can be bought individually to be assembled into the entire modular kitchen.
- Numbering: Products such as precious stones and others can be found with a merchant in large quantities; giving each of them a unique serial number and description can be a difficult task to do.
Selling products through multiple channels
Multi-channel sales of products can be a boon to merchants during the year 2020, where retail shop sales are very low due to the pandemic. While eCommerce platforms offer the fluidity of reaching out to customers sans geographic reservations, they may all have their own format for product data and catalogues per category and product that merchants need to adhere to. This means that merchants need to ensure that the data produced for their catalogue does not only consist of rich tech and all the necessary information for customers, but also qualifies the appropriate format imposed by multiple channels of sales.
Customer-centric pricing
Sometimes, products are priced based on the buyer’s monetary capacity, which can be seen often in B2B sales. Here, every category of customer has their own selling rates that will reflect separately to such customers when they browse online, making the product catalogue essential to be maintained.
Standardizing third-party product data
if you have given the task of producing product data to third-party organization or agency, you will have to alter and format it as per your discretion. This can become a time consuming process as changing little details such as the format, font, color and more attributes of the data received is a tedious process.
Why do merchants need product catalogue management?
The factors discussed above are part of a complex structure but very essential as it affects a merchant’s brand image and sales directly. Producing sub-par product data to minimize the complexities will cost such merchants the loyalty of their customers as today, every tier of customer expects to be informed about the product in the most attractive way with graphics, rich text and every information that would help them make an informed decision.
Product catalogue management and page experience
Product catalogue management is linked directly to the page experience update released by Google this year. To put it simply, the use of rich text, good quality images, the usage of keywords and providing a detailed product catalogue will help a merchant sell better, thanks to the user experience being brought at the forefront. This means, keyword dumping and other cheap tactics that come along with substandard product data will be counter-effective and lower the SEO ranking of the merchant’s brand page and name.
Now that you know about the importance of product catalogue management, it will be simpler to organize your data and streamline the process to receive the maximum benefit out of it as a merchant selling on multiple channels.
