How product catalogue management can improve your online customer experience and boost sales

As the pandemic drags on and brick-and-mortar stores are forced into a seemingly endless cycle of opening and closing, e-commerce continues to grow in importance. In this new landscape, where consumers are avoiding in-person shopping, it’s more vital than ever that retailers leverage the digital realm, tackle the challenges it presents, and continue to thrive as online competition grows.

To succeed in today’s digital market, e-commerce retailers need to have the right tools and systems in place to provide an accurate and attractive presentation of their products and a smooth, hassle-free experience from start to finish, across all channels. To do so, they need to effectively manage their product catalogues.

Multiple sales channels

Whether they’re a small business just making the leap to digital or a big multichannel company, retailers often have various digital points of sale, from branded sites to massive marketplaces like Amazon, eBay, and Shopify. Each sales channel has different format requirements for their product descriptions and images. Without proper catalogue management, companies may struggle to organize, standardize, edit, and publish quality product information, images, and multimedia across all sales channels. Product catalogue management can help retailers manage it all in a simple, streamlined way.

Multiple data sources

Another challenge companies face is that they often draw their product information from multiple data sources. Some data may be created in-house, while other information is acquired from third parties like manufacturers and suppliers. Either way, the data needs to be verified and adjusted to make sure it’s always accurate and of a high quality. If done manually, this task would be enormous and prone to human error.

Localization

Many retailers also operate in multiple markets, meaning the information on their sales channels must be adapted to suit local languages, prices, and pickup locations. Localizing all this information manually would be next to impossible.

Corrections

Without proper product catalogue management, retailers have to manually check supplier product data for errors, omissions, or low-quality images and contact the supplier to address the issues, significantly slowing down time-to-market and increasing the costs of doing business. In today’s rapid and competitive market, that means lost sales.

Regular updates

For retailers with large online inventories, manually updating product data, prices, and in-stock items would be unthinkable. Product catalogue management can automatically update prices, make corrections, and enter new information without the risk of human errors.

Staying competitive

As more and more retailers move their business online due to the pandemic, e-commerce competition has become fierce. What’s more, shoppers are increasingly savvy and good at comparing prices and other specs. If a price or product doesn’t meet their expectations, they’re quick to go elsewhere. That’s why it’s imperative that retailers know what the competition is offering. They need to keep their prices interesting and ensure their stock is top-notch. Product catalogue management can help with this, too!

Supplier compliance

Most retailers source their products from a wide variety of suppliers, which all use different standards and formats for their product information. With InterTrade’s product catalogue management solution, retailers get access to a pool of thousands of suppliers that adhere to the same data distribution standards, eliminating the need for manual validation and streamlining the data-sharing process. InterTrade also has a robust compliance program for an unlimited number of suppliers in any sector, ensuring supplier compliance.

Learn how product catalogue management can enhance the customer experience and increase sales

Contact InterTrade today to find out how product catalogue management can help your business streamline its product data processing to provide an attractive online shopping experience and deliver a strong return on investment.