February 7, 2020 
Over the past decade, the buyer journey has undergone a significant transformation fueled by digital technologies. Today’s consumers no longer limit their purchasing decisions to physical stores. Instead, they conduct thorough research, both online and offline, before making a purchase, with online platforms being their preferred choice.
The abundance of mobile apps and eCommerce platforms empowers consumers to browse products, access descriptions, and read reviews seamlessly. They seek a comprehensive understanding of products in one location rather than navigating multiple websites. This shift underscores the importance of a robust product catalog system.
In 2024, global eCommerce sales are projected to surpass $6.3 trillion, highlighting the increasing significance of online platforms in the consumer journey. With such vast market opportunities, businesses must prioritize efficient product catalog management to stay competitive and meet evolving consumer expectations.
A product catalog system is indispensable in meeting evolving customer demands for accurate, reliable, and updated product information across various devices and platforms. As businesses expand their product offerings, managing catalogs can become overwhelming. However, with an efficient catalog system in place, this process becomes seamless and productive.
Let’s have a walk through the basics pertaining to Product Catalog Management.
What is Product Catalog Management?
Product Catalog Management can be defined as the strategic process of organizing, standardizing and publishing product-related information across multiple sales outlets. It is essential in ensuring consistent customer experience by making accurate, and reliable product information accessible, 24*7.
Despite its myriad benefits, the product catalog management is not devoid of challenges. Some of the major challenges are:
Multichannel Marketplace
To cater to the evolving customer demands, businesses are upping their game by eyeing to offer the maximin product exposure achievable. This approach brings multichannel marketing into the scenario. Though having the products accessible across multiple marketing platforms may improve the sales opportunity, at times, it may seem daunting to achieve.
As the sales channels have different criteria for product cataloging, the eCommerce retailer is encountered with the challenge of customizing and curating their product catalog according to the sales channel they intend to leverage. This also leads to several secondary challenges such as product content consistency across channels and frequent product information updates.
Updating product information such as price changes, new features or additions if any, as well as the recent trends across several sales channels, requires extensive effort and this is one of the critical challenges in the eCommerce product catalog management space.
SEO-friendly Product Descriptions
Now, you might wonder what SEO does have to do with product catalog management? Well, as most of the customers would resort to a google search of a product in the first instance, SEO-friendliness of the product descriptions is the key!
Simply put, the product content must be searchable, user-friendly, grammatically correct and enticing to enhance the customer experience. However, the challenge arises when the businesses have to deal with rather a wide array of products or SKUs.
Why a Product Catalog System is required?
Now, let’s try to assimilate why a Product Catalog System is required.
To Deliver Consistent Customer Experience
Customer experience is crucial in making or breaking a business. Thus, eCommerce businesses must ensure consistency and accuracy of product information across several sales channels to deliver a seamless and personalized customer experience. Though ensuring product content consistency manually may seem overwhelming, an efficient Product Catalog Management system will turn the tables.
Customers might locate a product on an online marketplace and may navigate to the business website for making a reliable purchase decision. Product Catalog solutions assist businesses in efficiently managing product-related information in a centralized repository, making it accessible round-the-clock as well as ensuring accuracy and reliability.
With the help of a catalog management system businesses can manage product data in real-time that too with very little redundancy in the product information. A product catalog management software collates 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
Product catalog management solutions play a substantial role in improving a business’s growth perspective and ROI.
With these solutions, product scalability won’t be a staggering challenge anymore as businesses can ensure efficiency and lesser time-to-market their products.
To Customize Product Catalogs according to the Marketplace
The gen-Z customers not only expect a great shopping experience, but also consistent product information whether they are shopping online or offline. Conflicting or irrelevant product information in terms of the product image, description or price can impact the product experience negatively. Further, it may discourage their purchase decision.
A robust product catalog management system makes it easy to keep product information accurate, relevant and customized as per the guidelines of the concerned marketplace. Updated, digital product assets are a critical component to delivering meaningful and seamless customer experiences across the distributed eCommerce ecosystem.
Apt Product Segregation
Product catalog information management can be a staggering assignment and includes a colossal exertion of the inventory supervisor. Poor product categorization and order disappoint the customers and the odds of their returning back to the business website typically diminish.
Difficulty in accessing relevant product data may prolong the customer’s buying decision and businesses might have to lose a potential opportunity. However, a product catalog system ensures that the above challenges are taken care of. A well-organized and intelligent product catalog system enables the customers to explore through the product portfolio, online.
Conclusion
While ensuring correct, consistent and uniform product information across multiple channels, product catalog management services efficiently help in time & cost optimization along with managing a rather larger volume of product data. Product catalog management goes beyond simply creating and managing product data across numerous sales channels. A well organized and managed catalog promises higher business growth and ROI.
When it comes to choosing the right Product Catalog Management system, businesses are faced with a myriad of choices. However, if you are eyeing to obtain a competitive edge over your eCommerce counterparts, do get in touch with the Vinculum experts, today!
