4 Crucial Tips to Optimize your eCommerce Product Catalog

4 Crucial Tips to Optimize your eCommerce Product Catalog

Know about Product Catalog

Product catalogs have revolutionized the process of buying. They eradicate the need to be physically present to buy something or know about that particular product. At the convenience of your home, you get to know about the product in totality.

This document will discuss an eCommerce product catalog and how optimizing it can help your business prosper. Before moving forward, for all those who are new to this term or have very little knowledge of what it is, let us first know about an eCommerce catalog.

A product catalog is termed a kind of marketing collateral that documents essential product attributes that aids buyers make a buying decision.

These attributes or details include price, availability, color product features, descriptions, reviews, and more.

An ideal example of a product catalog for eCommerce is the Amazon marketplace, wherein you get a host of data in just a single click. Suppose that you wanted to buy a book. Amazon will list out all the details you would need. It would include the author name, book name, publisher's name, price of the book, the total number of pages, availability, price, offers, reviews, and more.

Who uses a Product Catalog?

Direct sales or the inside sales team Will use a product catalog to communicate important information about a product to their potential clients. They could always use it as a reference while speaking to the prospects or clients about their product's benefits.

Store or warehouse managers and operators Use a product catalog to know about the details or the inventory or stock specifics in their godowns.

The buyers or the decision-makers (around whom every business revolves) will use a product catalog to make a purchase decision. It would enable them to compare different products from the various suppliers and decide upon their business's most appropriate option.

On-the-field marketers Will use a product catalog while interacting with the customers and walk them through the demos of their product. It will enable them to dive deep into their product offering and offer immense value to their clients as they are the ones who will be experiencing the product.

Tips to Optimize your Product Catalog

Decide on the ideal category structure/navigation Retailers who have large product catalogs can always look out for mega menus, which are ideal choices, yet problems arise when merchants are not careful. What should be realized is that never to confuse a consumer or overwhelm them.

Additionally, if the categories are too specific, this would prevent the consumer from learning about new products they were never looking for but may have bought. Let us now look at some tips that prevent problems from arising because of poor navigation/categorization: 1. Have regards about the number of items in the product variety along with its depth and breadth. A mega menu will not be the go-to solution if there aren't many items in the catalog.

2. Always know how the consumer will shop. Conduct thorough keyword research and consider placing some subcategories in multiple parent categories.

3. An essential point that needs to be in mind is that consumers and search engines are most likely to understand text rather than pictures for navigation menus.

Prevent SEO issues resulting from duplicacy of content The SEO process can be devastated if the same copy is used for various product descriptions, or suppose using a description already present on another website, which counts as a duplicate content. Multiple paths to reach the same product are another example of duplicate content and can negatively impact the SEO cycle.

Say, for instance, when a food item exists under multiple subcategories: firstly under a particular product category type and nextly under a parent category of the food brand.

Hence avoiding those mentioned above will result in an excellent quality catalog.

Prune to help SEO When we discuss pruning in the context of SEO or websites, we tend to describe the practice of eradicating or enhancing the pages on a site that add very less value and can significantly harm the search engine rankings. It does not necessarily mean to remove pages altogether. Like, say, an out-of-stock product might get deactivated and be removed from the index. But this is usually done if that item returns later.

Enhance product descriptions A great product description will take into account the consumer and the process of optimization for better search engine rankings.

How to do both? Here it is: 1. Create a short, crisp, and engaging para about the product matching the brand image. Utmost importance, given to the process of inclusion of good keywords for SEO, is a must.

2. Never forget to include bulleted points beneath the para with greater specific info such as where the product is from, what it's made of, specifications, warranty, and more. Do not get confused and summarize what is in the para into bullet points.

Conclusion It is believed that this document has done justice to the title and has served enough insights about how to optimize product catalogs for increased growth opportunities.

Without basic and crystal clear knowledge, development is not possible.

The same holds for application. After reading this article, if you are not into action, a significant amount of learning has gone to waste. So, get hold of a top-notch eCommerce platform that has an equally greater product catalog solution ready for you and witness the various doors open for your business to grow.