Any business that sells online needs to ensure its product catalog is well-organized and constantly maintained. An organized product catalog helps you not only manage inventory, but can also help you discern which products are most profitable and identify opportunities for growth. And when you’re trying to wrangle data across various sales channels and among dozens or even hundreds of stock keeping units (SKUs), product catalog management can make or break an online business.
Whether you’re just trying to hedge against catalog disarray or your product catalogs are already getting a bit unwieldy, the following four key tips can help you manage product catalogs effectively across your online selling channels.
1. Get standardized
When you’re building your product catalog, you’re creating a periodic table of elements for your store. The more organized your product catalog, the easier it is to automate product recommendations, refine search results, and seamlessly integrate across various sales channels.
Regardless of the size of your catalog, establishing a consistent methodology for how you define and manage product details will help ensure consistency over time. Think of it this way: as your SKU volume grows, having an established way to manage that growth is one less thing to worry about while managing your business.
2. Provide the details
Sure, you can keep it simple with your product’s description, but getting into the nitty gritty of your product is a great opportunity to give shoppers the information they need to feel confident making a purchase on your site. First, make sure that all the relevant details, such as dimensions, sizing, materials, and images, are included for each product. Once you’ve covered the fundamentals, offer your shoppers some insight into your unique selling propositions (e.g., if your sourcing only sustainable materials, then note it in the product details). Also, product videos and customer reviews can be effective ways to motivate shoppers to complete a purchase.
You want to put your products in the hands of shoppers, so make your product stories inspirational and engaging. Doing so can help build shopper trust while giving you another way to tell your brand story.
3. Don’t skew your SKUs
Making sure your SKUs are consistent and organized will help you track inventory more effectively while also saving you time as you expand your online businesses to different sales channels. Develop SKU naming conventions that are formatted in a way that’s easy for you and your employees to identify products. Create a shorthand that will help you immediately recognize color, size, design, or any other relevant information, separated with dashes. To avoid conflicts with different inventory platforms, we recommend that you avoid using special characters such as & or # because not every system will recognize them.
Being strategic about how you organize and label your SKUs is an effective way to help you and your employees optimize your current catalog, while giving you a structured approach to scale as your business expands.
4. Use tagging to drive more sales
Often, shoppers don’t know what they want (or need) until you show them. A well-organized approach to categorizing and tagging your products doesn’t just help customers find the products they’re searching for, but it also provides an opportunity to show related products together at key moments of the shopper journey.
For instance, if your shopper is looking for a wool cap, there’s a chance they’re also on the hunt for more cold weather essentials, such as gloves or coats. So, for cold weather products, you could use the tag ‘winter’ as a way show shoppers related products with the same tag to drive more awareness and potentially more sales. With a smart approach to tagging, you can surface these relevant products at checkout or directly from the product description page.
With standardized categories and a smart tagging taxonomy, you can show shoppers more products, which can lead to upsell and cross-sell opportunities to drive additional sales.
Explore Buy with Prime
Buy with Prime offers ecommerce businesses an ever-growing collection of solutions and resources to help you grow your business. One solution that can help you keep your product catalog synced across ecommerce sites like Shopify, BigCommerce, WooCommerce, and Adobe Commerce/Magento, is the Alloy catalog update app. The app helps you manage product listings more efficiently by updating product variations and pricing from your ecommerce catalog to your Buy with Prime catalog. This improved functionality creates a consistent shopper experience across listings that helps build shopper trust and preserve conversion.
You can find the Alloy catalog update app, and other Buy with Prime apps from Alloy, in the marketplace in merchant console.
Learn more about Buy with Prime.