To go wrong on your product listing is to get prepared for losses in your sales.
Beloved e-commerce sellers, both seasoned and starters, if you have a messy catalog and product listing you must be aware that it will make everything unsearchable for both the customers and the search engines on the internet. A sensible eCommerce catalog will help keep your products like in a convenience store, attributing a physicality to the online shopping experience. The clarity of catalog and product listing holds the key to the visibility of your products. Likewise, a neat catalog will be very easy for the search engines to pick your product data. The same goes for customers. Categorization with curated product detailing will make your inventory in good order and get your products the expected visibility and sales.
Catalog Management- the No ordinary affair of eCommerce
If you don’t have an agenda to mark catalog management and product listing as ‘vital’ in your objectives, it would inflict a guaranteed hurt to your competitive advantage and sales figures. Selling on Amazon, Flipkart, eBay, Paytm, Meesho, or any such e-Commerce platform is not just a – “putting your products on display and activating the buy button” scenario. If you have thousands of products (SKUs) and multiple sales channels it will add more complexities to properly manage your product catalog.
Why do sellers often settle for average catalog management?
Catalog management is tiring, excruciating, and time-killing. Sellers are bombarded with large volumes of product data to segregate, and they are constantly challenged to bring about a decent-looking product listing where it must perform in the market. The heavy nature of the listing process makes every seller settle for a mediocre catalog and product listing, eventually to profit leakage.
How can we jump the pitfalls of mediocre Catalog and Product listing?
First, let us analyze the anomalies born from a premature product catalog.
Not so great catalog will result in
>Vanilla Branding
>Customer Attrition
>Negative Reviews
>Credibility Gap
>Low Ranking in Performance Index
> Listing Duplication and
> certainly, Diminished Sales
Let us break down the major missteps in catalog management and the remedies associated with it.
1. Grooming your brand to look Gorgeous
a. How to avoid description disaster
Even a typo in a product description is like putting your brand to slow death. When you place your SKUs in your sales channel (be it Amazon or eBay or Flipkart) give faithful attention while publishing product information. How do we expect customers to rely on incomplete information while purchasing our merchandise? Even worse is posting incorrect data about your product on eCommerce platforms. Analytic firms across the globe have survey data showing consumers’ responses to sellers’ inaccurate details on product catalogs- all the reports show consumers hesitating from making an order. Unquestionably, consumers won’t prefer products without a proper description.
Lesson Learned- Get your Product description right! Neatly laid out details with all the specifications and features of your products equals credibility. Buyers will sense the authenticity.
b. Hire a Photographer, or Exercise Professional Product shoot
The ‘appeal’ is crucial for virtual stores as a high-quality product image is what consumers get as close to the actual product. We must conceal the limitation of physical shopping by showing high-resolution images, possibly covering all angles of the product. A 360 impression of your products will snatch consumer attention. If your merchandise has various color and size options, you must strictly include all the available options on your online store. And yes, fewer images are not recommended. While online shopping, when we came across products with one or two images, we often feel it would have been nice to have some more images on the products.
Hiring a professional team for your product shoot is a wise step to consider. Aesthetically pleasing imagery is bound to have an attention quotient. If we arrange a product shoot, our merchandise stays league apart from normal images. It will juxtapose among competitor products and will influence consumer buying decisions.
Lesson Learned- A great product image will generate the right stimulation in the consumer’s brain. Likewise, it represents your commitment to your product and your selling business. Your products will highlight among similar competitor products, and consumers would feel like visiting a tidy physical store.
c. Making Descriptions Algorithm friendly
When you start displaying your products with a comprehensive and clear description, of course without errors, it will reflect your catalog code. Consumer behavior will witness a behavioral change in the selection process, and your catalog will get an elite attire. Once we make our products online with accurate and detailed descriptions, we are halfway done. But we have to push other factors to work to get the expected edge over competitors who already have their products lined up with decent product details. The other factors include optimizing your content so that it would sync your business with the eCommerce algorithm. We have laid a strong foundation and now must paint it for the others to see. Online markets like Amazon or eBay or Flipkart use complex algorithms and ranking systems to accommodate every dedicated seller to be on the top of the list. The right product description is a prerequisite to enter in the sale platform rankings but to scale the ranking heights and index we need to polish the wordings to make it search-friendly. All eCommerce sellers need to optimize their published product data to make it vulnerable to the internet. This means your product should pop up in the online marketplace if a potential buyer enters the respective keyword in the product search tab.
Like, if someone typed in ‘water bottle’, and we have ‘water bottle’ stocked in our warehouse (or if we are using third-party services like Amazon FBA, then our bottles will be in Amazon’s warehouse) our product should show in the search results. How on earth will Amazon showcase our ‘water bottle’ from the hundreds of thousands of similar bottles from other sellers? We must put our product content in such a way that Amazon’s algorithm will prioritize our product. We recommend professional assistance for your content optimization if you don’t have Search Engine Optimization (SEO) experts with you. Enabling SEO will not magically convert to soaring returns, but it is unavoidable and should stay integral to your marketing exercises.
The right combination of SEO, curated content, polished product descriptions and a properly structured catalog makes a strong foundation for your products to sit in the marketplace with a higher appeal, and will undeniably welcome customer attention. If your product quality is good, it will translate to projected sales figures if the conditions are met.
Lesson Learned- be honest with your product details, it would never dissuade your customers. Make your content curated to become susceptible to the search engine, SEO that is. A well-written product description won’t come up in search results if it is not visible enough. Do not hamper your discovery.
2. Anatomy of Categorizing, or the masonry of Product listing
We have dissected the elements of interactivity, the how’s and why’s of displaying and presenting your product in an online store. Now we will learn the art of structuring our product data to build a strong skeleton for our selling business so that we won’t trip.
We, at ESS, have encountered many sellers with deranged product data. This is a critical problem. We can’t afford to have a weak shell as it would easily crack when the complexities of the e-Selling business hit hard on our business. Some of our sellers were using obsolete instruments to comprehend their large and complex data; But they went paralyzed by the sheer difficulty in – arranging the list, deriving the metrics, and calculating performance indexes from the raw data. It’s not their fault, their rusty weapons don’t cut the bulk.
a. Centralizing your Core Product data
Being a catalog and product listing assistant, we have estimated the amount of time taken by sellers to update their product catalog daily – it’s a large indomitable chunk. Sellers always spend time revising their SKUs due to constant price variations or maybe adding new products to their stable. This daily process is reducing sellers’ engagement with their marketing and customer-facing operations. Implementing a centralized product information management system will help contain the chaos. If you already have an ERP in place, then we assume it’s been taken care of. ERP or Order Management system gives us the platform to keep all our product data in one place. It would nullify the chances for duplication of contents.
If you feel a lack of control over your seller data and wish to consolidate your catalog operation it is always wise to have a unified platform. Having an ERP (Enterprise Resource Planning) system in your process will help you streamline your operations. Product information can be standardized across multiple sales channels giving consistency to all your products. ERP systems can generate metrics from your seller data which you can use to evaluate the inventory performance and take feasible information for a better demand forecast.
You know how supplier data is, it’s raw, full of clutter, and bare minimum in details. Converting vendor data into usable, palpable, and precise information is a herculean task. If we lack the necessary tools, it will break our bones. Wrong formats, missing information, and the great disorder that comes with the data structures are the hurdles associated with the supplier data. We always swim through this muck when we work with different sellers to make their products into a well publishable form. We believe ERP will alleviate much of the pain in organizing your product data.
Lesson Learned- Switch to more capable management platforms if you have an extensive line of products and you are selling through multiple online channels. These platforms can pull useful metrics so that you can make decisions relevant to current market situations. Single source it is!Unprepared holidays are over!
b. Art for Categorizing or placing the right piece in the right place
Placement is a crucial factor. “We couldn’t remember where exactly we put our product” would be a clumsy statement to say to your customer-. Having no grip on basic information on online business is the same as horrendous as it can be in the physical world. Placing your products in your eCommerce should never be in a laid-back manner. Step into customer shoes before categorizing and tagging your products. If you are selling multichannel, each marketplace has its criteria for placing the products and they might have varied category structures and labeling.
For Amazon we might need to place our ‘Water bottle’ under > Home and Kitchen department. Flipkart might place it under > cookware. Effective tagging respective to the marketplace will let your customer navigate to your product easily. Categorizing and tagging should be based on customer behavioral data. Buyers will be more cherished if they have the option to filter between product variants. Tagging should follow a certain discipline. It should be consistent in following a format. Attributes are necessary. If your product has color or size options, mention the specifics. Customers often search for certain requirements. Never underestimate tagging and categorizing, it can converge appreciable numbers to our returns.
Lesson Learned – never deny tagging, they serve as breadcrumbs to our merchandise. Tags should follow a consistent style to draw traffic. Remember, categorized product items will be more reachable to consumers.
Endnote
Listing to Last
We have witnessed ambiguity with many of our seller clients, most of them had the tools but were deeply stuck in allocating the deserving time for their catalog optimization. Those who went taming their product data got stuck with the monotonous and tiring process and laid their weapons down to settle for an average product list. Catalog management is a meandering course on uncooked data. Sellers need to use effective management tools and professional assistance to seize the data and make an aggressive product catalog for their merchandise. On a short note -If you have a good product, place it in the right category, make a great description of the product, embellish the description with generic keywords for visibility and use tagging for searchability. If you think there is more that you need to learn on catalog management, we can chat for more insights.
If you want to make your products online on best marketplaces then, visit our latest blogs which helps you to know about how to sell on Amazon, Flipkart, Limeroad, Pepperfry, Paytm, Voonik, Snapdeal
