E-Commerce Product Catalog Mapping: Best Practices

Share:
Product Catalog Mapping

Since the internet has become everybody’s best friend, these customers go on it hoping to find not just your brand but information about your products as well.

All over the world, customers today have one thing in common – they are information savvy. They want products and services but need information before they can engage.

Also, they don’t just want this information scattered all over the place, but they want to get it most quickly and conveniently possible.

This information is often published as a product catalog and showcases products rich, consistent, standardized, and professional.

And in this brief article, we will be diving into what a product catalog is, why mapping it is important for e-commerce business, and some of the most common challenges that brands face when trying to map out their product catalog. 

E-Commerce Product Catalog

What is Product Catalog Mapping?

A product catalog mapping is a process of strategically showcasing the quality and excellence of your products in one digital point of reference.

Customers can grab this digital print and know what can be found. This process helps make informed and quicker buying decisions.

Product catalog mapping, for most customers, is evidence enough that not only does a brand care about how easily customers navigate their digital store, but it also tells of the professionalism of the brand.

Brands that pay attention to this aspect also tend to score extra points with their customers and attract buyers faster than those that leave their products unorganized and scattered about. 

Why Is Product Catalog Mapping Important For Every E-Commerce Business?

Product catalog mapping is primarily essential to ensure standard and efficiency. This helps customers save time and effort while making a purchase.

Below are some of its key benefits for any eCommerce store:

01. Provides A Better Customer Experience

Saving a customer’s shopping time alone is enough to pass off as a better customer experience. But catalog mapping does more; it builds trust when customers can see a catalog and match it with what they see physically.

And the more trust buyers have in a brand, the more they will patronize and recommend it.

02. Enhances Brand Growth

Providing a great customer experience is a recipe for making more sales and revenue, which translates directly to brand growth.

The better the product catalogs, the better the experience more customers will derive, and this can quickly grow your customer base, which is what every brand needs to succeed.

03. Boosts Brand Credibility

Nothing screams credibility better than standards maintained across various channels and offline as seen online.

Product catalog mapping allows brands to demonstrate their integrity by publishing only what they have and how they have it.

Customers quickly see this and decide that the brand has credibility and can be easily trusted.

Also, having a printed or printable product catalog alone proves that your brand is transparent with nothing to hide.

04. Creates a Database For All Your Products

A product catalog may be viewed as an item put together to make purchases easier for buyers, but it also does more.

Having a catalog also makes the job easier for your company – it creates a reliable database that can be used now or in the future to know what is in stock and all the items you have ever sold.

Key Challenges of Product Catalog Mapping

We now see that product catalog mapping is just as important as selling the products. However, it is not the most straightforward task to accomplish and has tons of challenges, including these:

01. Product Versatility

There are times when selling different products, especially as a retailer, can be daunting, and one of these is during product catalog mapping.

If creating a catalog for similar products isn’t tiring enough, creating a catalog for products in different categories is.

More problems arise when you realize that product catalogs need to be done to capture the correct and current descriptions and prices and need regular updating.

02. Different Channels

Most businesses sell across different platforms and channels, and while this means a greater chance of meeting more customers, it also means creating product catalogs for all the channels.

Even more challenging is that these different catalogs need to be done to fit the other channels so customers can easily access them without trouble.

03. Business Expansion

Every brand’s deepest desire is to grow and expand, but even this can often turn into a challenge when some of the tasks and operations the brands perform need to expand as well.

Growing your current catalog, collecting new data from new suppliers or manufacturers and even new competitors, and regularly updating it are some of the most common challenges that growing eCommerce brands face today.

Some of the Best Practices for Product Catalog Mapping

The following are some best practices that you can adhere to make product catalog mapping more effortless and more profitable for your brand:

  • Using a Product Information Management System (PIM) can make the task easier for your business
  • Always categorize and tag each product correctly and appropriately to make things easier for you and your customers
  • Create tailored catalogs and make them responsive to any channel, device, or operating system
  • Use specialized and automated tools such as a marketplace Scarper API

Marketplace Scraper API and How It Can Help To Bypass These Challenges

Using specialized and automated tools like a marketplace scraper API can take some of the work of mapping a product catalog off your shoulders. Here’s more info on the marketplace scraper API from one of the industry leaders. 

This software works to quickly collect an enormous amount of data from the marketplace, manufacturers, and your competition. That way, you never waste any time and regularly update to improve your services.

As your company sprouts and expands, a marketplace scraper API can also scale up to meet your more extensive needs.

Conclusion

Having a product catalog isn’t just for creating awareness, but it can also spark interest in the customers and makes it easier for them to decide to purchase.

But product catalog mapping is both demanding and challenging. Hence you would require some sophisticated tools to make it easier.

Join Software Buyers & Sellers

Get top software information and best deals right on your inbox.

HubSpot CRM Sidebar
ADVERTISEMENT
Popular on Begindot.
An all-in-one employee management HR...
monday.com is a leading project management and CRM solution,...
Smartsheet is a modern project...
Salesforce is one of the...

Promo Box*

Popular EOR Solutions

EOR (Employer of Record) helps businesses hire global workforce and make human resource-related processes easier.