9 Common Challenges of Product Catalog Management & How to Overcome
Ecommerce product catalog management is the most difficult part of online selling. Accuracy of product data requires organizing, standardizing, and publishing it perfectly across all the sales channels. Available to both buyers and sellers; product catalog contains data about store products to help customers make informed buying decisions. It is only the right information provided by ecommerce stores and online retailers that helps users to have a positive experience which converts them from visitors to customers.
Also, online shoppers today do not just look for products that satisfy their search criteria; rather, they expect marketplaces to educate them on the products. They seek assistance in narrowing down the choices, especially when the catalogs are large.
Why eCommerce product catalog management is important for eCommerce players
Product information in form of catalogs transcends across various channels, and is supposed to be complete and comprehensive. Ecommerce product catalog management seems simple, but unfortunately it is not. Your product types make SKU management complex.
1. Matrix/Variance/Product options
Imagine you are a clothing brand offering several product options, and every product line has attributes of size, color, brand and type and various other combinations. A t-shirt that comes in multiple sizes and colors like a Red, Large and Red, Small — must have related SKUs.
2. Kit/Assembly
If you are a home appliance retailer, you can either sell a stand-alone home appliance or a combination, or a complete range of appliances. This also requires you to manage all possible product feature combinations.
3. Serialized
Unique items have a serial number. As an online diamond merchant you may have only a handful of 1, 2 or 5 carat diamonds; but you will have to manage serial number for each of them.
If you want to streamline your eCommerce platform to drive sales; you are required to efficiently manage and map these products and their combinations in the product database to make it reflect in your product catalogs. What makes product catalog management so important is that it gets directly linked to supply chain efficiencies.
9 common challenges in eCommerce product catalog management
Catalog management is a time-consuming and labor-intensive process that involves several activities, each of which is equally significant.
Here are some of the common challenges that companies usually face in product catalog management.
1. Keeping data consistent and accurate
With 30% of catalog data being erroneous, and every error costing anywhere between $60–80; incomplete, incorrect, irrelevant, outdated, and duplicate data persistently bothers eCommerce companies and online retailers. The scope of these anomalies increases with the increasing volumes of data. Inconsistent data results in incorrect product categorization and dropping efficiency levels.
2. Managing multiple marketplaces
If survey results are to be believed, 76% of shoppers visit numerous other channels before exploring Amazon. This makes it mandatory for you as an eCommerce player or online retailer to have separate channels to market your products; following the different recommended listing practices. However, given the go-to-market time constraints in the wake of rising competition, it is always tough to maintain consistent databases.
3. Constant updating of product information and catalog expansion
Continual price updates, product information changes, and new product data capturing requires dedicated efforts. Further, to add more SKUs means to first ensure consistency in the existing product catalog data, which if inconsistent prevents immediate addition of SKU, thereby delaying catalog scaling.
4. Maintaining data quality for merchandising
In times when Quality of merchandise data directly impacts conversion rates, orders, and sales, online retail stores are required to update constantly and maintain their product data and descriptions at rocket speed to match high frequency at which new products get stocked. However, doing so is ensuring that data meets all quality parameters, which is a tough lengthy process of validation and verification.
5. Optimizing product pages
Search engines are highly critical in analyzing product descriptions and other content on product pages, with each eCommerce site having its own SEO policies. Amazon, world’s leading eCommerce company, does not allow repetition of keywords in product descriptions. So, it is not just about placing information, but that it each page has to be well-optimized to rank higher in the search result.
6. Editing product images
72% online buyers, considering product images as a key driver to their buying decision. Ecommerce shoppers prefer high-resolution product images containing detailed product descriptions. Product images are cornerstone of your success on eCommerce marketplaces. Every single product that is listed has to have an image that meets requisite quality conditions. Product photographs are therefore have to be edited and retouched. And more the products, more is the workload to edit and retouch product photos to make bring them up to magazine quality. Bad or unattractive product images simply means that your product is out of league.
7. Product catalog listing
70% of surveyed shoppers said they would shop for an item at a competitor if it was out of stock. Ecommerce giants like Amazon and Walmart penalize retailers for overselling. Not updating stock across every sales channel leads to oversell or undersell. It can annoy the customer and could potentially cause the customer to go to competition. Given the variety and volume of products, it becomes a daunting task to perfect your stock taking procedure.
8. Competitors’ price analysis
Incorrect or inaccurate product pricings can have serious implications on sales, revenue and hence business growth. Exploring various e-marketplaces to channelize your sales not only involves adhering to listing requirements. Finding out and analyzing what pricing structures your competitors are following is equally important. The task becomes increasingly difficult to accomplish as range of products to be sold on ecommerce platforms widens.
9. In-house catalog management
Challenges mentioned above are a result of inability to manage the quality and consistency of your product data. It is perplexing to maintain data when eCommerce players are supposed to customize that data for various sales channels, normalize data from their suppliers, or want to add new products to expand the catalog.
To manage the situation, a lot of online merchants resort to Excel or their eCommerce platforms. However, these options are a complete failure when we are talking about large or a complex online product catalogs, like the one you have.
Excel wasn’t built for eCommerce catalog management. Managing large volumes of SKUs in Excel or your eCommerce platform can lead you to have misspellings, omitted attributes, or flat out wrong descriptions. Also, you will have to rely on your employees to make mass updates and changes manually leading to human errors.
Ecommerce platforms can perform basic SKU management; but what about catalog management? How will you import, normalize, and publish data to the rest of your sales channels? Do you have a strategy to tie product data to advanced inventory management or order fulfillment needs??
How should eCommerce stores overcome eCommerce product catalog management challenges
Considering all the challenges above, and looking at non availability of skilled resources, operational scalability and flexibility, and limited access to latest technology is what makes outsourced catalog management an enticing option. Ecommerce players and online merchants having tested the outsourcing waters for catalog management have shown positive and promising results.
Professionals at HabileData are proficient at doing data entry in multiple languages and on various ecommerce platforms and marketplaces such as including 3dCart, NetSuite, Volusion, Yahoo Store, Monster Commerce, Buy.com, eBay, Amazon, Sears, Magento, Zen Cart and X-Cart.
Our extensive range of eCommerce catalog processing services that facilitate your business in improving customer engagement and sales conversion includes:
· Catalog updating
· Catalog data entry
· Catalog data cleansing
· Catalog migration
· Catalog product upload
· Catalog image tagging
· Catalog data indexing
· Shopping cart data entry
· Catalog product data classification and categorization
HabileData, as an efficient eCommerce catalog processing outsourcing service provider combines skilled and experienced professionals with latest tools and technology, to update and add product information on eCommerce sites. We understand the importance of online store maintenance for your eCommerce business; hence our catalog management experts’ perform catalog processing round-the-clock. HabileData operates 24/7 to ensure that product catalog processing is done in hours which have minimal impact on your online buyers.
