If you are an active seller on any eCommerce website, maintaining and managing your product catalog can be a tedious task. With thousands of SKUs to be published across various sales channels, you need to continuously update and manage data. But with increasing product database, the complexity increases, ergo merchants end up settling for substandard product information.
Here is a list of the common challenges faced by merchants in setting up their product catalogs:
Updating Products Constantly
Many merchants need to update their SKUs continuously, owing to the nature of product they sell and their target audience. Either their pricing structure keeps changing or they have new additions in their store every day. This leads to product mismanagement and increases your workload.
Selling Across Multiple Channels
If you are selling your products through multiple channels (eCommerce giants like Amazon, eBay, Jet.com, etc.), listing your products on all platforms can be an uphill task.
Merchants need to adhere to the specific guidelines mentioned by each eCommerce platform while listing their products. Amazon’s product categories are different from eBay, and vice versa. How you list your products on eBay can slightly vary from the way you list them on your own site. This leads to incorrect product categorization followed by limited product information for customers’ consideration.
Tailored product listings can save your time and resources and allow you to concentrate more on business operations like marketing, customer support, etc. Undertaking catalog processing services might help you to tailor your listings whilst strictly adhering to store guidelines.
Dealing With Supplier Data
Often times, the supplier forwards the product data which is imprecise and incoherent for listing. As it is a B2B transaction, suppliers don’t standardize the information the same way merchants do. (If you spell color green as ‘GRN’, they might use ‘gn’) Thus, it can take weeks for some companies to categorize the data properly.
Expanding Product Catalog & Maintaining Consistency
A messy product catalog makes it harder to accommodate more SKUs, thus hindering your business growth. Excel wasn’t built for eCommerce catalog management purposes. And if you don’t have the tools required to update your product data, you’ll have to rely on your employees for making the mass changes, eventually leading to errors. Also, human error knows no bounds until it does. And, dissatisfied customers (for they’ll have inaccurate information) don’t build a good reputation.
How To Tackle These Challenges?
Many merchants handle their catalogs in a haphazard way – spreadsheets being handed over from desk-to-desk in different departments of the company. With online items on your eCommerce platforms, and brick-and-mortar product data living in Excel or a POS system, merchants don’t have a streamlined process of updating and maintaining their product catalogs. Thus, searching and updating products across different places (where it’s stored), becomes a problem for them.
An up-to-date, organized, and information-rich product catalog provides buyers with the product insight they need to make informed buying decisions. SunTec helps online merchants seamlessly process their product catalog through its fast, accurate, cost-effective eCommerce data and content services, including product listing and managing their merchandise across multiple platforms, and cleansing, standardizing and enriching product data. It saves time and allows them to tend to other business needs.
For More Information
If you feel your product catalog needs to updated and optimized, please drop a mail at info@suntecindia.com. We can discuss how our eCommerce Catalog Processing Services can support your content uploading, editing and organization needs.
