Keeping up with best practices in catalog management is a critical part of online selling.
Get insights on buyer behavior
It involves understanding how buyers search while shopping online, the phrases they use to locate items and identifying the typical search terms related to the product.
This insight can help sellers standardize names and descriptions used for generic categories, individual products, and specific variants and SKUs in their product catalog on the eCommerce platform.
Sellers can also use this insight to identify and include additional information for specific categories, that can influence the buyer and accelerate her online purchase decision.
Why it’s important
Large eCommerce players follow best practices in catalog management that lead users to the right products quickly and create meaningful onpage engagement.
It helps them reduce bounce rates, speed up transactions and enhance overall user experience on their platforms. This often becomes the key differentiator between a successful eCommerce company and a not-so-successful one.
Most of them have dedicated resources for their Online Catalog who handle day to day management of the existing and new products being sold on their app and website or via other marketplaces.
The problem with marketplaces
eCommerce players including giants like Amazon and Flipkart usually act like aggregators, enabling third-party sellers to sell on their platforms.
These sellers typically sell on multiple online channels to reach a large customer base that they would never have been able to access via a standalone app or website.
However, most of them are left wondering why their products, which are highly appreciated by their direct customers, don’t perform well on these eCommerce marketplaces.
Why does it occur
It is seen that most sellers do not consistently maintain product data. The product names and descriptions they use are not standardized or optimized for site searchability. They use their own terms and abbreviations to describe different variants and SKUs.
After all, they are used to operating within their stores, where they are present to decode the unique ways in which they record their product data. So naturally, they don’t realize the importance of a professional approach to catalog management for online selling.
It takes them some time to realize that on an eCommerce platform, they are not in control, the customer is. When a customer searches for a product on the platform, she may not find it because the search terms and phrases she uses may be different from the seller’s metadata for that product.
Even if sellers realize the importance of consistent product data, and though all eCommerce channels have laid down guidelines to standardize product feeds, most sellers simply don’t have the resources or the time to do this in-house.
Help is available for smaller sellers
To fill this gap, there are full service eCommerce catalog management agencies who offer cost-effective solutions to clean up, standardize and optimize product catalogs for better searchability.
Since these service providers have specialized resources and use a professional approach for online catalog management, it’s a small price for the seller to pay for increased sales!
