Product catalog

In your brick-and-mortar store, you display your various products on shelves or racks. Your customers walk through the aisles picking the products they want to buy. This makes it easy for them to check, compare, and choose what they want based on what’s physically in front of them.

Similarly, a product catalog does the same but online. It’s how you display your products in an organized manner that is easily reachable to your customers. Ecommerce product catalogs contain all the product details and attributes from products that a seller, vendor, or supplier wants to distribute or publish on various sales channels.

What is a product catalog?

An ecommerce product catalog is like your store’s digital shelf, where all of your products are neatly organized and presented for customers to explore online. It’s like recreating the experience of browsing and picking items from racks in a physical store, but digitally. A well-designed catalog enhances this with intuitive features, like live search, product categorization, and filtering options, making shopping easy and personalized for your customers. By including customer reviews, testimonials, and user-uploaded images, the catalog not only simplifies the shopping journey but also builds trust, giving new shoppers the confidence to make informed choices.

Unlike traditional print catalogs, product catalogs are dynamic and can be updated instantly, ensuring your product info stays accurate across online stores, marketplaces, and social channels. This ensures accurate and consistent product data across all sales channels, enhancing the shopping experience and helping businesses attract, inform, and convert customers efficiently.

What is a product catalog feed?

Ecommerce product catalogs are usually imported via product feeds or product information feeds, which are essential elements in the catalog management process. These are the technical names for the data marketers export to their catalog management software. Once imported into a system, the data from the product catalog feed is checked for accuracy and then exported to multiple sales channels for online shoppers to browse and purchase.

How can a strong ecommerce product catalog benefit your business?

Product catalogs play an important role in influencing your customer’s decision to purchase with your brand. Today, ecommerce has more than 2.71 billion customers from around the world. A well-designed product catalog is more than just a list of products. It is the backbone of your ecommerce business that reflects your brand image and crafts an efficient brand experience for the customers.

/ Amplifying your product display Your ecommerce product catalog is the first impression of your brand that you create among your visitors. A rich product catalog with accurate descriptions, images, and other product details, including well-designed navigation offers an inviting front for your customers to easily purchase what they want.

/ Tracking your customer behavior Ecommerce product catalogs allow you to trace your customers’ navigations and interactions through their entire shopping journey. With the use of data analytics tools, you can track what links your visitors have clicked on, how long they stayed on each page, what products are in demand, and other key metrics. This helps your ecommerce business create a better shopping experience for your customers based on their preferences.

/ Boosting traffic to your store Your product catalog can serve as a magnet for increased relevant organic traffic. With well-optimized product titles, descriptions, and meta tags, you can improve your website’s ranking on search engines. When potential customers search for your products, or products similar to yours, having a catalog optimized with their popular search terms will lead them to your store more easily.

/ Streamlining personalized experiences A robust catalog provides valuable data on customer preferences and helps you develop targeted marketing campaigns. You can further create personalized recommendations, email promotions, retarget your past visitors, or provide suitable discounts and offers to drive customer engagement.

/ Managing your inventory Unupdated stocks are one of the worst disappointments for your customers. An ecommerce product catalog ensures that your inventory is managed efficiently with stock levels updated in real-time. This informs the customers about product availability, reduces overselling, improves your operations, and builds customer trust by displaying available products only.

Why is product catalog management software important?

With commerce complexity wreaking havoc on the complex paths that stretch between consumers and the product catalog suppliers are trying to sell, manual work on product catalogs has become more than just time-consuming and a waste of time and resources, it is now also totally unnecessary.

Online catalogs on their way to multiple sales channels and ecommerce platforms can now be integrated into next-gen product-to-consumer (P2C) management platforms or individual P2C solutions and software. Product catalog management with a P2C provider can cut down work on a catalog from multiple days to just minutes or hours. The fact that AI-based systems are merging, mapping, collating, and quality-proofing frees up huge amounts of resources and working hours for other activities.

If marketing teams no longer had to rely on IT departments for their product catalog updates, fixing errors, or even launching new products or creating sales events, they would be able to get new products to market much faster. They could also test and experiment with new products on new or existing channels and execute changes and corrections on-the-fly, avoiding further escalations.

Automation via a new software or P2C management platform also gives the operating teams more time to concentrate on growth and adding new channels and markets to their sales efforts. Marketing teams weren’t destined to spend their days checking spreadsheets for errors. By locating all of their data from their product catalogs in easy-to-read centralized dashboards, marketers can enhance and enrich the data according to their current marketing needs and strategy.

How can Productsup help you create well-performing product catalogs?

Setting up a strong ecommerce product catalog is essential to run your ecommerce business successfully. But it can take up a lot of your time and effort, distracting you from your actual business goals. At Productsup, we assist with your catalog management needs. Our Onboarding PX offering enables you to import, consolidate, and optimize product data in any format, from any source, and under a single platform, in order to create comprehensive and ready-to-use product catalogs.

Ready to begin your ecommerce product catalog management journey with us? Discover our Productsup platform solutions for more details.

• Productsup’s Feed Management solution
• The Product Content Syndication solution