If you operate an enterprise SaaS company or an eCommerce organization, you are certainly familiar with the struggles of having to manage a sizable inventory of goods and services. However, have you ever invested the necessary time in optimizing your product catalog? If not, you're losing out on a lot of opportunities to increase income, improve user experience, and reduce overhead.

 

Not only will it make your managers adore you at work, but if you can lead this endeavor, you'll also release a ton of huge victories that your business can leverage for years to come. Before moving on to the following actions you need to do, let's quickly review what product catalog optimization is and its key advantages for those who are unfamiliar.

 

What is optimizing a product catalog?

 

The process of organizing, presenting, and generally enhancing the efficacy of a product catalog and the contents contained inside it is referred to as product catalog optimization. This can involve undertaking things like:

 

• Classifying products 

• Improving search engine visibility 

• The catalog's aesthetic design

•  

Making it simpler for customers to identify and buy the products they want can help a firm improve sales and revenue through cross-selling and up-selling. This is the purpose of product catalog optimization.

 

What advantages does improving your product catalog offer?

 

Although we explain a technique later in the post, optimizing your product catalog isn't always simple but when done correctly, it has significant advantages for both your business and your customers. Among those advantages are:

 

Enhanced user experience

 

Do you work for one of the 55% of businesses that don't test user experiences? Are you aware that poor usability contributes to the demise of 70% of internet businesses?

 

Your whole user base benefits when you invest the time to thoroughly investigate and optimize your product portfolio. However, the data demonstrates that, in the end, cross-selling and up-selling actually assist you in increasing your own sales.

 

For instance, businesses that provide more sophisticated search, filtering capabilities, and thorough product information assist customers in finding what they're seeking for more rapidly. However, it also offers an additional layer of discoverability that enables your users to discover new things or products that are complementary to those they are already purchasing.

 

SEO (search engine optimization)

 

Product catalog optimization can assist a company's search engine rankings by arranging products in a way that is simple for search engines to comprehend. In turn, this might encourage more people to visit the catalog, which might boost sales.

 

More potential for upselling and cross-selling

 

Did you know that, on average, upsells and renewals account for between 70% and 95% of revenue?

 

Your sales staff and website visitors will find it simple to view related items, sales packages, and product bundles if your product pages are optimized to take use of your newly optimized catalog. If done correctly, this increased insight will encourage your clients to spend more per transaction and make it simpler to upsell to more lucrative goods.

 

For instance, it would be ideal to display all add-on services, such as long-distance plans or international data plans, before a customer purchases a cell phone plan from a telecommunications provider.

 

Enrichment of data

 

A dataset can be made more useful by adding more data, a process known as data enrichment. You can give each product choices for package bundling and discounting, regional price, and manufacturing information, for instance. Your company may use better quality data to market and sell its goods and services more successfully through various sales channels.

 

Increases the quality of cross-currency products

 

Some goods need independent pricing based on geography or markets, as we indicated in the data enrichment section. This can be a result of the local economy or simply an effort to maintain exceptional competitiveness in a market with high market value. You can gain an additional competitive edge over your rivals by regionally optimizing your product catalog pricing.

 

Support for discounts and CPQ lead pricing

 

Configure, Price, Quote (CPQ) solutions can truly assist your sales teams if your product catalog is optimized with data enrichment and other product details. This gives up a lot of opportunities for new revenue because your sales professionals and self-service users will be able to rapidly and accurately generate estimates for configurable goods and services.

 

Depository for centralized product data

 

You may cut costs associated with data analysis, product returns, and the storing, managing, and enriching of product information by using a billing platform product catalog to keep track of your products. Furthermore, it can aid in enhancing customer centricity, the correctness of product information, accelerating development procedures, and guaranteeing data consistency. The success of e-commerce can be increased by using Product Information Management Systems (PIMs), which are very effective at managing a centralized product data repository. Due to these factors, companies should think about enhancing the power of their billing system or product data repository.

 

What actions must you take to optimize your product catalog?

 

You might wish to take the following actions to optimize your product catalog:

 

Update product information in your tool for managing your product catalog.

  

To maximize a company's productivity, boost sales, and maintain educated and engaged customers, it is critical to incorporate fresh data into a billing platform or product catalog management tool.

 

Create a pricing book for these regions in your billing system or product management application if your product needs varying costs depending on the region

If your products use usage-based pricing methods (per-unit, tier, or volume), describe them.

 

To establish connections between the primary product, supplementary products, and alternative products, create product categories and taxonomies.

 

When all this data is entered into a system, you can automate procedures and eliminate human error, saving your company time and money and creating the possibility of automating the way that data is provided to clients. 

 

Additionally, by engaging customers with pertinent promotions, the use of triggered messaging based on data from product catalogs can aid in increasing sales. Last but not least, keeping customers informed about changes to goods or services by timely emails will stop them from abandoning their shopping carts within the first 10 minutes, as 71% of US consumers do, and will ensure that they stick with your company. 

 

Increasing product discovery: 

 

Making it simple for clients to find the products they want requires an effective search tool. Depending on your product and the manner in which you sell to your customer, this could signify many various things.

 

This may imply:

 

• To enable cross-selling and up-selling during sales calls, enterprise sales must provide the sales team with brochures, product data sheets, or a digital product database. 

• eCommerce businesses create carousels with dynamically created product lists in addition to other innovative techniques to display alternative or complementary products during a purchase.

•  

Make your pages search engine friendly.

 

Because it gives search engines a means to better comprehend the page and product, creating metadata is crucial for optimizing a product catalog. For illustration, you ought to improve:

 

• Descriptions and titles in meta 

• Data structure 

• Images

•  

Improve the catalog's aesthetic appeal:

 

Customers' perceptions of your company may be significantly impacted by the appearance of your product catalog. To improve the catalog's visual appeal, think about utilizing high-quality photographs and a simple, straightforward style.

 

Test and evaluate your product catalog's performance:

 

After making the necessary adjustments to your product catalog, it's crucial to evaluate and gauge their efficacy. This will enable you to spot any locations that could still need work. Your data can help you identify areas that still require work as well as those that have been addressed. Increase the effectiveness of what is already in place while modifying or eliminating ineffective elements.