Digital Interactive Services

Best practices in eCommerce catalogue management

The e-commerce industry has witnessed exponential growth in the past decade. With many competitors in the market, businesses are impelled to expand onto multiple online and offline channels to sustain their growth and market share.* However, this kind of expansion brings various problems, the biggest being the complexity of maintaining an increasing product inventory. This is where product catalogues come into the picture. A well-structured product catalogue has the power to enhance consumer experience as well as improve and enhance the brand identity.

Challenges in eCommerce catalogue management

A business needs to have a well-organised, accessible, and detailed online catalogue that meets customer requirements. If you do not implement the right e-commerce catalogue management solution, you risk working with inconsistent and unreliable data. It will also result in low operational productivity, reduced data quality, subpar user experience, and a dip in revenue. In the rigorous task of creating and managing an e-commerce catalogue, you might fact these few common challenges.

• Involvement of stakeholders and vendors:

  The involvement of internal and external stakeholders and suppliers can culminate in multiple hassles during product catalogue management since your business would be required to meet their demands at all stages. Tackling different business models and processes and collaborating with various teams can make managing the product catalogue time consuming and tedious.

• Catalogue scalability:

  As your business grows, its operations will spread and expand across various domains. The e-commerce catalogue would also be required to accommodate newly introduced products without compromising on consistency within the catalogue structure. The lack of a scalable structure can result in issues with product catalogue expansion.

• Catalogue readability and neatness:

  Maintaining an uncluttered and comprehensive e-commerce catalogue is paramount for a satisfactory user experience. You can streamline the catalogue with precise and accurate product categorisation and details, pricing, specifications, and regular updates. An inconsistent product catalogue with low readability can cost your business its customers and conversion rates. You must manage the catalogue across multiple channels such as applications, web browsers, and their mobile versions.

Best practices for eCommerce product catalogue management

Businesses need to follow certain best practicers to ensure a reliable e-commerce product catalogue management. These practices can save you a lot of time and resources and help you in transforming into an industry leader.

• Use relevant and credible product data:

  A dependable product database with accurate product information is crucial in digital catalogue management. Low-quality and incomplete product data can be detrimental to your business. Maintain coherent data with timely updates on product details, pricing, technical specifications, and other necessary attributes. This will ensure that your customers trust your brand and keep coming back.

• Define and organise product attributes:

  Maintaining a well-defined and clearly categorised product catalogue is essential in the e-commerce business. You should consider and define all the product specifications such as size, colour, price tags, characteristics, and so on.

• Personalise your product catalogue system design:

  To understand customer behaviour, customise your product catalogue. You should clearly distinguish between different target audiences and customer bases and show them more relevant information. Factor in information such as product type, pricing, quantities, technical details, and other attributes to provide a personalised and seamless experience to your consumers across all touchpoints.

• Select the right catalogue management tool:

  Depending on your business model, selecting and implementing the right catalogue management solution for your enterprise is vital. Consider parameters such as the size of the existing business, available technologies, features of the product catalogue, availability of resources, and business expansion. Some digital catalogue management tools for e-commerce businesses include Product Information System (PIM), Microsoft Excel, and ERP software, among many others.

How can Infosys BPM help?

eCommerce product catalogue management is absolutely essential for your business to stay ahead of the competition. By properly implementing the practices mentioned above, you can efficiently manage your product catalogue and leverage it to bolster your position in the industry. You will need state-of-the-art digital catalogue management tools and services to achieve optimum scalability. Infosys BPM offers brand governance, catalogue management, marketing, back-office support, and report and analytics under the marketplace management services. Contact us to explore more value-driven ecommerce marketplace management services.

*For organisations on the digital transformation journey, agility is key in responding to a rapidly changing technology and business landscape. Now more than ever, it is crucial to deliver and exceed organisational expectations with a robust digital mindset backed by innovation. Enabling businesses to sense, learn, respond, and evolve like a living organism will be imperative for business excellence going forward. A comprehensive yet modular suite of services is doing exactly that. Equipping organisations with intuitive decision-making automatically at scale, actionable insights based on real-time solutions, anytime/anywhere experience, and in-depth data visibility across functions leading to hyper-productivity, Live Enterprise is building connected organisations that are innovating collaboratively for the future.