Managing an e-commerce store comprises multiple time-consuming tasks. Product listing, categorization, optimization, and specification management demands expertise and accuracy. With multiple competitors creating a website of their own for global reach, better listing and optimization attracts customers to your platform.
In such a scenario, choosing professional e-commerce catalog management services becomes a prerequisite, to serve your target customers and potential market. Product listing and catalog management is an extensive task and it is challenging to hire skilled experts in-house. On the other hand, well-learned and experienced professionals work 24/7 to make these services available to you at nominal costs. Before we delve deeper, here is a quick guide for you to understand e-commerce catalogs and listings.
What is e-commerce listing and product catalog management?
Product listing involves updating and organizing products on the online store. It is done strategically so that when a customer searches for something, the relevant products must appear on top. Optimized listing, according to product category and search queries, makes the purchase easier and increases sales.
Product catalog lists all essential product data and information. It displays the type, color, specification, texture, usability, size, and other details that impact purchase decisions. Professional product catalog management is important to ensure that accurate product data is made available to the customers. Incomplete details, wrong specifications, and errors could lead to fewer purchases and instances of return or replacement. When done properly, catalog management improves the overall store appeal and performance.
Major catalog management challenges and how do service providers resolve these to grow your market share?
With technological advancements, time shortage, and demand for convenience, online shopping is drastically growing. However, for certain products like accessories, clothing, and makeup, purchasing without actually having a physical look and feel of the product becomes difficult. This is when e-commerce catalog management helps. While it is an important factor that drives high product sales, it also has a lot of challenges. Some of which include:
1. Selling on multiple platforms is complex
While selling on your website, you might also want to leverage the power of other platforms. Product listing and the catalog on Instagram, Facebook, Amazon, or other sites, differ from your website. Moreover, the content composition and details required also differ, ultimately making it complex to handle the catalog. Remembering all these details and matching the content standards of these platforms at times gets overwhelming. While the way people view your products on each of these would be different, brand identity must match across platforms. Thus, hiring e-commerce product listing services become essential at times.
Service providers are quick and efficient. They are well aware of the business components, the catalog section, listing feature, and UI/UX of every platform. They manage your catalog across platforms and create interactive content for each of these. Experts also analyze previous listing and catalog performance across selling platforms, study the trends, and streamline the catalog to boost your sales.
2. Inaccuracy leads to high return or replacement rates
Inefficient, complicated, or poor cataloging results in high returns or replacement. When the right information is not made available, the products customers see online might differ from what they get delivered. Product size, color, representation, how they look on a certain body type or skin color, patterns, and textures, must match with the real product in your catalog. As per a report of 2018, lack of proper catalog management in the US lead to a cost of over $600 billion in a year. These things not only lead to financial loss in terms of shipping and return charges, but you might also lose loyal customers and your brand value.
E-commerce product catalog management service providers, on the other hand, are proficient and accurate in management. For example, they ensure to use a size scale for different products, specifying what would fit well to people of different demographics and genders. They always display the ingredients in food products and expiry dates in medicines. They stick to clear descriptions, dimensions, and realistic product images to set the customer expectations and reduce chances of product returns.
3. Inefficient product category and subcategory mapping leads to fewer sales
Your e-commerce store might have different products depending on age groups, genders, usability, requirements, budget, and so on. All these products need specific categories and sub-categories so that the right product is visible while the customer searches for it. E-commerce product catalog management becomes extremely hectic especially if your brand spans across products like books, clothes, electronics, furniture, lifestyle, grooming, etc. Moreover, inefficient categorization of the catalog could lead to some products being left out during sorting. As the buyers couldn’t see the product, it gets skipped, leading to fewer sales.
Expert service providers have in-depth knowledge of all the marketplace categories and sub-categories. They list all your existing and new launches in the appropriate categories to avoid any chance of the product being missed out. The products are assigned at the product level and retailer level. E-commerce product listing services also include new category suggestions and A to Z existing category management to maintain your store hassle-free.
4. Maintaining high content quality and relevant information is difficult
Content quality on your e-commerce website is an important aspect that keeps users hooked. Imagine one product listed with 10 images displaying the product from each angle and another one with just 1 image? What would you prefer to look at and buy? Of course, the one with more images as it is easy to understand, process, and expect what the product would look like physically. Your sites’ authenticity and credibility is built on the type, quality, appeal, and value of the content. Similarly, when it comes to text, making it readable, error-free, brief, and maintaining the font type, styles, and colors, simple yet appealing is essential. Often overlooked as small tasks, listing products with high-quality media and product details is quite hectic.
When you choose product catalog management services, you get a catalog featuring high-quality, unique, 100% original, and interactive content. They even make the catalog easy to navigate, search, sort, filter, and purchase through. The product specifications and details are mentioned in a simple format making it easy to read and grasp. These experts with in-depth product knowledge and content understanding develop a top-notch catalog to get high conversions.
5. Pricing policy and inventory details are dynamic and need constant update
Pricing and inventory management is probably the most complicated task as it is dynamic in nature. Special dates, occasions, seasons, months, and similar other factors determine the cost, coupons, and special discounts on the price. Also, prices for B2B and B2C customers must differ in your catalog to fulfill their expectations better. Knowing when a product is out of stock, which product is added to most of the carts, and tracking low-performing products is a never-ending process. As it takes a lot of precision and time management to keep your product catalog up-to-date, it is better to hire e-commerce product listing services.
Professionals use advanced tools, technology, and analytics to track your inventory. They categorize, organize, update, and add new products across different sales platforms timely. All relevant information can also be updated and scheduled automatically. When all these activities are streamlined, the unwanted efforts you might put in manual tagging or bulk updating are eliminated.
Unable to choose the right e-commerce product catalog management services? Here are a few details that could help!
The above-mentioned points clearly establish the importance and challenges of e-commerce catalog management. They also give an insight into how experts’ help can do wonders for your business. Whether you just launched your website, are confused about listing your products, or cannot manage a vast catalog, professional services are available just a click away.
Choose Ecartize today to solve complicated listing and catalog management problems! With multiple pricing options, our services come at a nominal cost and deliver 100% personalized details. Product specification normalization, content optimization, tailored plagiarism-free content, image uploading, and unlimited updates on inventory are a few other benefits that you get. Ecartize has proudly served over 500 clients in the past 10 years and we constantly strive to make managing e-commerce businesses simpler. Schedule your free 30 minutes consultation today and leverage the power of professional e-commerce catalog management!