Have you taken stock (pun unintended) of the time your employees spend fixing order mix-ups and catalog attributes? If you’re still getting customer complaints of receiving the wrong products, it means you’re missing the key ingredient, i.e. a well-defined and clean eCommerce catalog. While seemingly counter-intuitive at first, the extent to which your operations can run like a well-oiled machine depends on the accuracy and promptness of listing data. Managing catalog updation manually or through disparate systems equals making your team spend more effort and hours than necessary on this single task.
Why is this a big problem and how will this get worse? Think about rapid digitization and the pace at which ecommerce is growing, driven by internet penetration and shopping behaviours. As sales channels diversify and order volume rises, relying on manually-intensive methods to manage omnichannel catalogs invite delays and errors to the chain, impacting the customer experience adversely.
Automating eCommerce catalog management saves almost 30% of effort hours on a weekly basis, which saves time and lets your warehouse team get more work done in a shorter timespan. It maximizes sales potential while maintaining all channels centrally. In other words, effective catalog management saves time, simplifies shopping and boosts sales– all of which jointly contribute to customer satisfaction.
In this post, we’ll examine what commerce catalog management means along with the benefits of automating the process through a comprehensive eCommerce solution.
What Does eCommerce Catalog Management Mean?
eCommerce catalog management entails maintaining a digital list of a business’s products. It impacts inventory because stock levels and the count have to be updated according to the order flow. While cataloging and listing are interchangeably used, the former provides granularity and encompasses all listings, while the latter refers to a single product with basic details like its name, size and description.
Catalog management involves
- Defining categories for the listing breakdown.
- Assigning products to the appropriate category.
- Adding descriptions and supporting images.
- Importing the listing into an automated system.
- Performing SKU matches per channel and reformatting where required
- Ensuring that the seller is pushing the correct listing at multi-marketplace levels.
Catalog systems are the first piece in the chain link. Getting it right, therefore ensures that minimal time is spent on pending tasks in the sequence. The resulting sync between the information uploaded and inventory count contributes to pipeline planning.
By automating the entire process, you not only reach this goal, but also get absolute visibility to track and match inventory movements to listing updates.
In the next section, we’ll go over how the Base system’s powerful automation works to streamline catalogs, auctions and offers.
How The Base Listing Management System Works
The Base eCommerce system syncs listings before pushing to correct marketplaces in the steps given below
- The product parameters or attributes such as its size, color and price are defined on the Base system which generates a unique product ID , called product creation. This step simplifies inventory management and tracking across multiple marketplaces.
- Sellers can use the export/import option to make the list live on the Base system, readying it for export to integrated marketplaces.
- With a single click, the prepared product list is exported to various integrated marketplaces during which time the system performs mapping to ensure synchrony between the seller’s custom SKU and marketplace codes.
- Base validates the listing by performing a Quality Compliance (QC) check.
- To ensure that only accurate and compliant listings are pushed live, the system flags SKU Mismatches and returns an invalid queue message on a virtual belt, which the seller can go to for further investigation and correction.
- The seller has options to list individually or in bulk. Individual listings apply to a single product to the marketplace where the seller has to populate all fields manually on the system. The Base system extracts information from the CSV file provided for bulk listing. Product variations are accounted for by using parent and child SKUs which accommodate a range within a category. For example, a clothing line can carry different sizes in the same color.
- Once the values are connected to establish that the IDs refer to the same product, the file is listed on the marketplace.
eCommerce Catalog Solution Benefits
Migrating your listings into a dedicated catalog management system helps in
1. Expedited Ordering Processing
Organizing listings from different marketplaces makes it easier to manage offers. It’s as simple as locating and identifying the item in the shortest possible time.
You can maintain a central repository that updates stock levels per marketplace. As product information gets updated, the changes reflect uniformly across sales channels, preventing errors and mismatches from propagating forward. With proper sortation, you can see channel-level information with regards to stock and reshuffle inventory accordingly.
2. Match Demand to SKUs
Data from eCommerce product catalogs can help you clean your inventory around demand. Merchants can assess demand and prepare for seasonality by recognizing specific times during which high-demand products are ordered, ensuring reordering points have a buffer and suppliers can get the required quantities to your warehouses on time. This way, the seller won’t run out. They can set up reorder points with accurate lead time to ensure they aren’t starved during busy times and can confirm orders as volume grows.
3.Listing accuracy
By keeping track of listings, there is a sync between actual sufficiency and listing data. You can set an inventory threshold to ensure that orders are not confirmed if stock levels are 0 or negative. In other words, cataloging ensures you’re not pulled into a cycle of overpromising and underdelivering.
4. Parameter definition
An automated catalog management system lets you create parameters that are unique to your business, making it easy to identify them when you export them to marketplaces.
On the Base system, enhanced parameters give sellers greater control to perform listing actions such as AI-generated descriptions that can be replicated in the language of choice and parameter grouping. This saves several hours because a seller can now choose parameters with pre-set values of text, multiple choice or dropdowns to zoom through a large inventory.
5. Improved visibility
Cataloging ensures your listings are widely accessible based on the relevance to a user’s search intent. Consequently, your website gets rewarded with a visibility boost by search engines.
6.Reduce lead-to-deal cycles
Today’s customer has a shortened attention span, so the ability to quickly answer and end their search with the most relevant match drives conversions and increases the percentage of successful checkouts.
Points to Remember Before Investing in An eCommerce Catalog Tool
The type of system you use depends on the size of your business. When you’re starting out,you’d default to spreadsheets for its simplicity. But as you scale up, you’re going to need a dedicated system that captures growth and automates a host of functions that follow cataloging. The key point is that investing in an automation engine gives you a greater degree of customization and control over workflows, which saves your business effort hours and labor charges (and with fewer mistakes!). Here are a few tips to help you make an informed decision;
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Maintain an information database
Since catalogs hold vital and complete information on products, keeping it in a centralized database helps you to manage it easily instead of skipping between systems. Add security protocol by restricting user access by role. On Base, users have the option to set up employee profiles and distinguish between accounts so that the administrator knows who accessed what level of information, and when.
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Use a system that enables upscaling
A listing management system within an eCommerce automation system like Base gives you control over the actions that you wish to automate. It lets you view listings under a separate tab from order and product lists, offering clarity to the seller.
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Create a catalog management process
With multiple stakeholders accessing the same system, it makes sense to create a workflow or sequence depending on who is impacted, and when their role comes into focus. For example, if you are a distributor who wants to add more products to your existing catalog, you’ll create a flow,starting with
2.1 Collecting information from suppliers.
2.2 Creating a file to upload all the data into a system.
2.3 Checking SKU templates mapped with marketplaces and verifying templating compliance.
2.4 Coordinating courier and geography.
- Use categorization tags
Make the digital product catalog easier to navigate with relevant product tags that can be applied to the filtering system. This helps customers add related products to their prime finds. The seller too can determine which attributes are most and least searched for and cluster tags under broad categories.
Bonus tip : Use a consistent naming or numbering convention that is easy to remember and stick to. For example, use the metric system if your audience is based in the U.K or Commonwealth countries. Similarly, if the letters S,M and L are used to represent clothing sizes, make sure to apply it uniformly across your label.
To Conclude
By restructuring catalogs and revising the SKU format, sellers benefit from quickly and accurately recognizing their listings. Through an eCommerce system, a merchant can sort out discrepancies and unify all marketplaces while being in the position to tell their listings apart, driving prompt fulfillment.
Ready to automate listings and stand out in their customers’ minds.? Explore Base for 30 days straight to streamline your internal processes
