How catalog management tools can boost customer experience

Imagine you're shopping for a new washer and dryer. After spending weeks researching online and in-store, and even consulting friends for recommendations, you reach a decision. You go online to make your purchase, armed with the exact make and model, color, and features you want, but the product spec sheet that ensures you're buying the right item is unavailable or outdated. Your confidence in the retailer is compromised, sending you back to the drawing board — or to a competitor's website.

It doesn't matter how perfect a product is if its presentation on a brand's website is lackluster or confusing. Recent research finds 55% of consumers will abandon a purchase online if the information listed about the product is incomplete, outdated, or otherwise inadequate. Of course, no brand wants an uninspiring product catalog — but they've spent years wrestling with rigid management tools. Today, however, digital commerce leaders are no longer limited by antiquated and complex commerce catalogs.

What is a commerce catalog?

A catalog is to a digital commerce site what a menu is to a restaurant, listing everything available for purchase along with all of the relevant information about a product (like pricing, availability, technical specs, product-specific information, and so on).

Imagine trying to buy clothes online with no way to filter by category, sort by size, or differentiate undergarments from overcoats. If the catalog is poorly designed, it is harder for consumers to find what they're looking for, or search according to the criteria that matter to them. Imagine also if that catalog never varied. The opportunity to grow ceases to exist without change.

According to McKinsey, "organizations that use technology to revamp the customer experience can carve out significant differentiation," and increase consumer satisfaction by 15 to 20%. In the case of online retail, the digital commerce catalog is where the consumer spends the majority of their time when making a purchase, making it the ideal venue for taking advantage of this opportunity. Recent consumer research found that consumers around the world listed a functional product catalog as essential for a better online shopping experience.

Microservices with macro benefits

Brands can benefit significantly by offering consumers a tailored and comprehensive online experience, but not all catalog management tools are up to the challenge; dated, rigid solutions don't allow for the necessary flexibility. In order to address this issue, brands trying to offer a better catalog experience develop complex, manual workarounds, which can turn into black holes of time and resources. That's why retailers should look for a flexible, modern solution that eschews the need for short-term stopgaps.

The optimal consumer experience relies on responsive product catalogs that enable retailers to showcase the right products to the right customers at the right time for the best chance at success. The world has come a long way since the days of mail-order catalogs, but some of the biggest online retail brands still force consumers to wade through static presentation and unintuitive navigation, because all of the components that make up the catalog are leaning on one another for support, tied together. This lack of flexibility leaves no room for personalizing the customer experience.

An innovative catalog management tool will decouple the architecture so that products, price books, hierarchies, and catalogs are all independent of one another. This provides merchandisers with the ultimate flexibility to create thousands of product variations that seamlessly cater to consumers and their needs.

Infrastructure for catalog management

Many brands have multiple business approaches aimed at varying accounts, geographic and demographic priorities, and models (from B2B, to B2C, to B2B2C). Each of these require a unique approach to brand positioning, lead generation and nurturing tactics — and the flexibility to manage the multiple catalogs quickly and easily. Without the innovative architecture to support the management of multiple catalogs, brands will struggle with heavy customization and high costs, just to build and launch the experiences their customers expect.

Companies with less complex business models can also benefit from flexible catalog management. Even within one business model, different consumers have different needs. Brands leveraging consumer data are equipped to present shoppers with options most likely to pique their interest. In order for merchandisers to capitalize on this data, they require the flexibility to design and launch product experiences that customers demand. This includes enabling the ability to save preferred specifications (like, for example, size on a clothing site) and automatically sort and create product hierarchies to deliver on specific needs.

Pushing updates to multiple catalogs

Many brands maintain separate catalogs as a best practice for serving different audiences, but find themselves mired in manual efforts to update each catalog when, for example, the price of an item that appears in multiple catalogs changes. By decoupling price books from each catalog a brand maintains, and instead maintaining one overarching price book, a catalog management tool saves brands the time of updating each catalog individually.

Some events also necessitate separate catalogs, like the holiday shopping season. Brands can plan catalog shifts accordingly by showcasing seasonal patterns, gift options, and special sales—all of which should be seamlessly facilitated by a catalog management tool. But brands should also be able to rely on easy adaptability in the case of a flash sale, a product debut, or any other merchandising change.

Other events that catalyze new catalogs, however, are sudden and ephemeral. This is when speed really comes into play. Many brands may want to push specific products based on weather patterns in specific regions (like winter coats before a storm). These pivots are made possible by flexible and comprehensive catalog management technology that lets retailers showcase new, relevant offerings to consumers without manual updates or expensive workarounds.

Catalogs are critical

Many brands dedicate their time and energy to honing their products, but fail to fully leverage catalogs as a means for creating a streamlined and differentiated consumer experience. There are numerous benefits to maintaining multiple catalogs outside of those mentioned above — testing new go-to-market strategies and offering an elevated experience for loyal customers, for example.

But without the right management tools, merchandisers will struggle to capitalize on differentiated experiences, leaving the brand to look just like every other still using outdated monolithic tools. The beauty of Composable Commerce and the flexibility it brings to catalog creation and management is that consumers can expect a thoughtful experience every time, satisfying their needs so they're sure to return over and over.