HOW TO: Maintain a Product Catalog that is Geared Towards Sales

rohit@suntecindia.com eCommerce Catalog Processing July 19, 2014
Product Catalog

Maintaining a product catalog that is geared towards sales will benefit your eCommerce website greatly.

Maintaining a catalog that constantly keeps providing revenue can be a daunting task. Here are a few tips to help you keep the inventory filled with items that sell well.

Ever since eCommerce websites exploded onto the mainstream, their owners have had to face with an array of challenges along the way. It is rightly said that starting an eCommerce business is quick and easy, but making it succeed is not. There are a number of choices for shoppers, and with the constant growth in the number of websites, the competition is only expected to increase. In such a case, a major problem that eCommerce entrepreneurs face is to maintain a catalog that is both attractive and sells well too. This is because storing items in the inventory that do not sell much takes up a lot of money and valuable resources, and also a lot of space, which can otherwise be used for storing products that sell. And even if you follow drop shipping and do not have to worry about inventory management, you still need resources to maintain the catalog. We have compiled a list of 5 things you must do in order to ensure this, and a regular cash flow, for your business.

  1. Sales Log
  2. Perhaps the most obvious step is also the most overlooked one. People just do not track their sales history well enough to determine the products that are doing well and the ones that are not. When you know which products are selling well, you can mix those insights with trend projections to come up with a good range of products to feature in your catalog.

  3. Average Selling Time
  4. Selling is not enough. You need to measure the time that an average sale for a product takes to lock. If it’s taking too long, and you need to invest a lot of resources or, worse, money in it, then you aren’t really making profits with it. It might be a good idea to wipe that product off the catalog. Make the word “ROI” your favorite word when dealing with catalogs.

  5. Additional Offers
  6. Certain products sell really well when sold together. If there are products that aren’t performing too well, you can try to come up with offers to sell them with other products and see if it boosts the sale of both those products. If it does not, then you will want to axe the product altogether.

  7. Customer Feedback
  8. You aren’t serving your customers well if you aren’t listening to them. Make it easier for them to speak and express themselves. This is a sure-shot way of finding out the products that are the favorites of shoppers and the ones that do not go down too well.

  9. Product Description
  10. Last, but definitely not the least, you need to write really good product descriptions for the products that you’re selling. You need to have original, well-written and detailed product descriptions. This might be a huge, and only, difference at times. Include every detail, every technical specification and every policy in the description.

Follow these tips to come up with a catalog that has items which do not stay in the inventory for too long and makes things easier for you to manage. Once you have a good catalog in mind, you can hire catalog processing services to upload, maintain and update that catalog.

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