Product Catalog Optimization: 4 Best Practices

Online product catalogs are the digital reincarnation of traditional brick-and-mortar store shelves. Product catalogs contain all necessary information on offerings and enable customers to make a purchase decision just like in times of physical shopping. However, it will work effectively only in case you competently approach your digital product catalog management.

What are four best practices for product catalog optimization? Read this article to find out.

Update your product data in real-time

There is no worse experience for shoppers who invest their time in searching for an item and placing an order than finding out that a coveted product is out-of-stock. E-commerce businesses that frequently fail to deliver an order or deliver it with considerable delay risk damaging their reputation.

To create a trusted brand, it’s necessary to ensure that your product catalog can be updated in real time. Then, the automated product data update is the only cost-effective way to avoid out-of-stock situations and any other gaps in the supply chain operations.

Implement a centralized product data storage

When you go omnichannel, implementing a centralized product data repository is a critical step. Centralized resources that all team members can easily access give ultimate control over product data and allow the building of clear and well-structured workflows.

Here are some more advantages of information centralization:

• Analysis reports that encompass information, associated with each individual channel, can be seamlessly implemented.
• By centralizing data, you can avoid data duplication, which also simplifies access to needed information.
• Data analysis from different separate sources can be expensive, since it may entail a license fee for multiple software packages. With all data in one place, you can reduce these expenditures.
• You can achieve fewer product returns by providing accurate and relevant product data to your customers.

Although data centralization is an inevitable step in your omnichannel endeavor, it’s also a challenging one, if you don’t opt for data automation. PIM solutions are purpose-built to ascertain data integrity and come with features to collect product data, store, manage, and enrich it effectively.

Showcase upsell and cross-sell products

Following this product catalog management practice, you can increase your average order value. Furthermore, upselling and cross-selling are 68% more affordable than acquiring a new customer.

With upselling, you show your website visitors product suggestions of a higher level than the one in question. In other words, you recommend buyers to pay a little more but wind up with a better product. Cross-selling targets the rather quantity than the quality of the purchase and encourages customers to buy more by displaying complementary to the primary product items.

For example, if a client is considering buying a laptop, you can offer them a newer model — it is upselling — or showcase some other products, like a computer mouse or headphones — it is cross-selling.

Correlate your digital and physical resources

The nature of physical and digital environments is obviously different, and so is the behavior of online and offline shoppers. When buyers shop online, they deal with a virtual product and call for its more detailed information with high-resolution images or even the possibility of accessing products via augmented reality. The latter feature is crucial for brands specializing in furniture, fashion, and beauty.

In the approach to brick-and-mortar product representation, in turn, merchants would play on the five senses: eyesight, hearing, taste, touch, and smell, and create a better experience precisely for physical interaction with a product.

Also, the symbiotic relationship between the physical and digital are on the agenda. The ROPO or research online purchase offline effect is a widely-spread tendency among buyer shopping behavior. 71% browse online some of the time before they go to a physical store. This is where omnichannel strategy along with e-commerce catalog management automation comes into play again. To streamline the ROPO effect, it is crucial to correlate the information, available on the website, with your physical resources and allow customers to buy online and pick-up in store without delays or any other problems.

Why Integrate a PIM System with Dinarys?

Dinarys is a worldwide digital agency for retail and brands with more than eight years of experience in e-commerce. We provide a full range of e-commerce development services.

Our company is a leading provider of Pimcore-to-Magento integration services, an award-winning open-source platform that manages digital experiences and expands various opportunities for a worthwhile shopping experience, such as

• Omnichannel strategy support.
• Handling millions of products with customer-specific prices and assortments.
• Complex product configuration automatization.
• Winning more customers with better sentiment analysis and personalization.

We have completed numerous projects for our clients to help them modernize their e-commerce product catalogs and streamline their overall business performance. Contact us and we will build a firm foundation for your customer experience.