The role of product catalogs is gradually increasing when it comes to improving both online and in-store customer shopping experience. Product catalogs have been long known to represent a story about a brand and what it sells. However, over the years, the role of product catalogs has evolved.
From placing product information in a consistent and structured way, product catalogs, today, are more about bringing several distinct pieces together. It makes easy for enterprise partners, sales teams and end users to access the products, services and other offerings.
The present digital product catalog rendered by e-commerce owners is all about providing dynamic product information in real-time. They have come over a long way to empower e-commerce owners to enhance the appearance and vibrancy of products, so prospective customers can better imagine and visualize their products. It makes them highly influential in catching customer attention and convincing them in their purchase decision.
What is Product Catalog?
According to Gartner, a product catalog contains all commercial product information that enables product marketing managers to define and map new product offerings. This encompasses certain sets of tools that allow configuration of new products and service bundles, pricing and discounts.
It can be defined as marketing material that contains all the essential details about the product, assisting customers in their buying decision. These product details may include the product title, description, features, price, dimension, weight, color, customer reviews and so on.
What is Product Catalog Management?
Product catalog management refers to the process of aggregating, managing and structuring product details into catalogs across numerous channels, departments, organizations and geographies.
It simplifies creating and managing product descriptions, relationships and hierarchies, updating prices, categorizing products, managing inventory and streamlining the ordering process. It offers a seamless and consistent product experience, providing better cross-sell and upsell opportunities.
Why You Need Product Catalog Management
Product catalog management today has become so crucial that without a proper management strategy in place, your data can become inconsistent and messy. Here are some instances when product catalog management becomes necessary.
- Product information is coming from multiple sources
- Collaborating with different departments and team
- Managing separate product catalogs for different channels
- Selling in multiple languages and currencies
- Managing access control rights
In addition, manual product data management can be tedious and time-consuming. Altogether, it can impact your data quality, operational efficiency, product experience and ROI. It becomes even more complicated when you have several sales and marketing channels to manage.
The 6 Best Practices for E-commerce Product Catalog Management with Pimcore
Managing e-commerce product catalogs is now more crucial than before. Without implementing the best practices for product management can ruin your product experiences and hurt your business revenue.
Here are some good product management practices that you can implement with Pimcore to improve your product management.
#1 Make your product data relevant and reliable
When managing a digital product catalog, your first priority should be to make sure customers are provided with comprehensive product details to make them comfortable shopping on your online store. This can only be attained when you provide accurate information in your product catalog.
Incomplete, inaccurate and inconsistent product data can be really harmful for your e-commerce business, especially when you are selling on multiple channels. Low-quality product data can immediately turn down prospective buyers, which results in losing their trust and a potential sale.
High-quality, reliable and relevant product information can boost customers’ trust in your brand and urge them to keep coming back. With the right product information management tool like Pimcore, you can create accurate product catalogs wherever and whenever you need, and deliver updated product information across all channels.
#2 Personalize your product catalogs
Customers today expect brands to know about their choices and preferences no matter what platform they choose to shop. They desire to receive personalized experiences at every stage of their shopping journey.
The core concept of personalization is the understanding that no two customers are the same. That means you cannot feed the same product data to a different customer base. For instance, the prices, quantity and attributes will differ for B2C and B2B customers.
Businesses sometimes want to present separate contents, such as price according to the time and situation, to certain customers. Pimcore enables segmenting of your product catalogs that target different audiences, which can serve relevant content, and offer seamless and personalized experiences.
#3 Keep your product catalog database clean and organized
As an e-commerce product catalog contains every tiny detail about a product, which can be used to improve product discovery, maintaining a product database becomes an unavoidable part of optimizing the catalog.
To keep your catalog database clean and uncluttered, make sure you have a single source of truth for your product catalog. That means storing all your product information in a single database only. This is not only efficient, but it can also prevent any errors.
If you are planning to expand your e-commerce product catalog in the future, make sure you also evaluate the feasibility of database expansion. Pimcore facilitates adding new product catalogs in the database, keeps them organized and prepares them for distribution across multiple channels.
#4 Map the product catalog management process
Any e-commerce business that involves multiple stakeholders can easily get difficult when it comes to managing a product catalog. Every product catalog needs to clearly understand regarding what parts need to be worked on, at what time and by which stakeholder. It is also important to determine when these changes are going to reflect during the process.
One way to overcome this challenge is by first mapping out your catalog management process and clearly defining the roles of every stakeholder involved. Appropriate mapping will provide a clear understanding of whom to reach out when your product catalog needs an update, who will be affected and when they will be affected during the updating process.
Pimcore’s Product catalog management tool is one of the best tools for mapping products, managing databases, specifying roles and authorization, facilitating scalability, improving information flow and much more.
#5 Clearly specify and categorize product attributes
Imagine you visit an e-commerce store and see all products scattered across the site. Or, the website relies on relevant keywords and tagging only to discover a product, which results in hundreds of different tags linked. A clearly defined product category is vital in the e-commerce store.
Product categorization refers to creating a hierarchy of products in any system that ties them based on relevancy. In every category, products with similar tags and attributes are grouped logically. Proper categorizing of products enable e-commerce businesses efficiently manage their product data from multiple sources in a single place and prepare them for even more usability.
With Pimcore, you can create a well-designed product catalog by adding all product specifications and defining all attributes of products, such as color, size, price tags and so on.
Supportive specifications can also be added when a product belongs to multiple categories. Pimcore can effortlessly categorize and classify hundreds of millions of products to improve search relevancy and user experience.
#6 Cross-sell and upsell with relevant products
After you categorize and tag products, you can increase the likelihood of selling secondary products related to the primary product. Cross-selling and upselling are the most popular techniques, which are increasingly used for suggesting related products. You can generate more revenue without minimal or no extra effort.
For instance, if you are searching for a mobile phone, most e-commerce stores will also suggest phone cases or damage protection plans. That’s what cross-selling is – selling related products to increase your customers’ order value. With upselling, you suggest a better quality phone to make your customer spend even more.
With Pimcore, you can leverage better cross-sell and upsell opportunities by creating uniform and standardized product catalog by connecting rich product content, digital assets and master product data, and delivering customer-centric experiences.
Key Advantages of Product Catalog Management
Besides standardizing information from multiple sources and managing product data across several networks and devices, product catalog management has many other benefits. Here are some:
- Seamless information flow
- Customer-centric customization
- Improved customer experience
- Flawless branding
- Higher business sales and revenue
- Consistent product information
- Omnichannel enablement
- Saving time and resources
Conclusion – Invest in the Right PIM
The process of product catalog management has become a vital element in the efforts towards successful e-commerce business. A strong product catalog management tool can benefit both your business and your customers.
Customers can have accurate and complete product information for making an informed buying decision, while you can earn maximum profit with minimal effort. Pimcore’s robust product catalog management tool is the ideal choice for many businesses when it comes to managing large e-commerce product catalogs.
With Pimcore, you can automate product catalog management-related processes, such as uploading, harmonizing and publishing product catalogs to multiple sales and marketing channels. Thus, Pimcore makes sure that your customers always have access to rich, consistent and high-quality product information.
