Posted 14.03.2025
Managing your product catalogue is a necessary job for any ecommerce business. Whether you’re running a small online shop selling a handful of items, or your product offering runs into the hundreds of thousands, some level of management is needed.
And it’s important to get it right. According to Google, 85% of shoppers consider product information and pictures to be important factors in their purchasing decisions. You need to present customers with every detail they need – and these details need to be correct.
This means finding an effective and reliable way to manage your product catalogue – but what does that mean? And why could this be difficult?
Here at Evolve Trader, our mission is to help make your product catalogue management as straightforward and effective as possible. And that means answering all your questions on the subject.
Consider this post your complete introduction to product management. In it, we’re going to look at the benefits that doing it effectively can bring, as well as what specific challenges you might face and how to overcome them.
But to start, we’re going to answer the question exactly of what product catalogue management is.
Product catalogue management is the process of storing, updating and organising your product information. This is usually done by building a central database to store all your data, so it can be pulled through to other places when needed.
The stored product data usually includes:
Managing your product catalogue effectively benefits you AND your customers.
Firstly, it helps you keep your product data accurate and consistent. It means you always have access to the correct information so you can make informed decisions. This is particularly important when you use multiple sales channels – it helps maintain consistency across them.
But access to accurate product information is also a big part of a positive customer experience. Whether it’s stock levels, specifications or prices, customers want product information that is accurate. If you don’t make it easily accessible, they’ll find a competitor who does.
Even if they do stick around, incomplete or inaccurate product information can still damage customer relationships. It can undermine the authority and reliability of your business, suggesting you don’t know enough about your products. Or it could imply that you don’t want to share the information, which can seem sinister.
Finally, efficient catalogue management can streamline internal processes. Not only will it make the data you use more reliable when pulled to different sales channels, but it will also make it easier to change manually as all the information is stored in one place.
Effective catalogue management is vital for B2B ecommerce businesses – but it isn’t always easy. It can be complicated by a range of issues – and some can have significant impacts. Here are some of the most commonly seen challenges:
Some B2B ecommerce businesses have product catalogues containing hundreds of different products. Thousands even. And the more products you have, the more opportunities there are for errors.
And the structure of most catalogues means that the odd mistake or issue can quickly multiply. An issue that also increases the more products you have
These issues can make it hard to track stock and keep product descriptions relevant, and can also damage the user experience of your website. All this can drive away customers in large numbers.
Product prices, specifications, and descriptions are vital information to your website users. If the details your website shows are out of date, visitors will not only feel frustrated but will also be likely to abandon your business. If you’re willing to show them incorrect information, how can they trust your products?
Unfortunately, when your product range runs to three figures or more it gets difficult to keep all your data current. Staying across changes on that scale is hard enough but even if you manage that, details can be missed, mistakes can be made. And in many cases, all it takes is for a visitor to notice a single inaccuracy to drive them from your website.
If your B2B ecommerce business sells across different platforms or sales channels, you need to make sure your product information is consistent across all of them.
This becomes even more difficult when different channels have different listing requirements. Manually maintaining accuracy and consistency across them all can feel impossible.
However, inconsistent information will confuse customers. At best, it forces them to reach out to you for clarification, adding unnecessary friction to their customer journey and taking your time to answer. At worst (and most likely) it will drive them towards your competitors as they look for a more reliable option.
If your ecommerce business is built around reselling, you’ll likely be using product data from a third-party source to describe your products.
Adding this information to your own catalogue creates another opportunity for mistakes to be made. Whether this is changing product information or your own business information, the data input offers plenty of chances to make mistakes.
And these opportunities increase even more if the format needs changing to suit your needs, or extra attributes need to be added.
Finally, one big challenge of product catalogue management is the tedium of actually doing it. It’s a very methodical, repetitive task that requires careful attention to detail. Even if you enjoy working with data or numbers, the cross-referencing and input involved are so extensive that it becomes a challenge in itself.
Leaving it up to one person, or even a small team, to do it on a regular basis can quickly lead to burnout. At best, it will likely lead to frustration and sloppiness – increasing those inaccuracies again.
Automating aspects of this process with specialist programs and software lowers those risks. Even removes them completely. It reduces the risk of human error, relying on software that can reliably duplicate information indefinitely.
Almost all the challenges of ecommerce catalogue management stem from the need to work with vast quantities of differing product data while maintaining accuracy. And the easiest way to do this is with specialist catalogue management software.
There are four main ways to do this, depending on what you want to achieve and how much you want the task automated. They are:
There are obviously benefits and drawbacks to each method. ERP is a good option if you need to integrate with other departments and harness other features. This software is essentially a centralised database that pulls together information from a number of different functions. It can be used to draw together data for HR, finance and stock management – but functionality is not as extensive when it comes to product catalogue management and the challenges that brings.
Similarly, many ecommerce platforms like Shopify have their own in-built catalogue management features but these can be limited. Performance varies across platforms but none will offer as much support as specialist software does.
PIM software is designed with product information management in mind. It’s a dedicated space to store essential product details so you can easily find, retrieve and edit them.
If you want the most complete and reliable catalogue management possible, then dedicated software (such as our own Evolve Trader software) is the answer. Evolve Trader allows you to connect your ERP and your PIM system with your own ecommerce platform to reduce data entry (and the opportunities for mistakes).
Manual product catalogue management can be full of challenges, but Evolve Trader’s catalogue management software works with your B2B ecommerce platform to help you create an all-in-one solution that showcases your products, supports inventory management and lets you monitor returns seamlessly. Talk to us today to find out how we can reduce your product catalogue management challenges.
