If you own a business, then you definitely know how important it really is to create a product catalog. A product catalog can make your customers see all of your products available for sale. It provides all the info about a product briefly that a customer needs to know before making a purchase. Creating a product catalog is not that difficult; you can either use your own knowledge or the easy way, which is the Product Catalog Software.
Benefits Of Having The Online Product Catalog:
Having the online catalog is required for any business that desires to expand the sales, but it also brings many benefits:
- Faster launch times
- Cost savings (cheaper for maintaining than paper)
- Customer Behavior Analysis
- No limits on materials or space for the catalog
- Potential for new markets and broader audiences
- Distribution across several social networks and sales channels
- More effective and agile consumer service
- Interactivity with the user
- Marketing that is more flexible and omnichannel
- Instant catalog fixes
How Can You Design Your Online Catalog?
If you are gonna make the first online product catalog, or if you desire to improve the one the brand has made so far, we can tell you how you can make a product catalog that responds to your fundamental aims of any brand and consumer. First, check the following basics for starting the online catalog:
- Will you really be giving up on paper and going for just the online product catalog?
- What’s the reason for the catalog?
- Do you desire to encourage more sales, or change the company image?
- What type of response do you desire to have?
Know The Audience:
First of all, you will have to comprehend in-depth what type of consumers the catalog is targeting. A product catalog for business to business distributors with necessary technical info that is very precise would not be the same as the online product catalog targeting young individuals in the eighteen to thirty age ranges. Acquainting who the particular audience is, you will be better capable of adjusting the style of your catalog: its SEO, language, layout type, and items’ location on a page.
When the consumers locate exactly what they’re searching for, both sales and traffic conversion will boost consequently. To profile the audience, you can utilize the site analysis program with heat maps that can analyze where the users really spend most of the time; feedback and registration forms from among the existing consumers; reviews of the products or those of other contending companies; and comments and online forums.
Get Yourself Some Good Content Management System Software:
Whatever the primary objective may be, you will require the support of a program that can organize the product content and show it in the manner you would envisage, as well as keeping quality at the point the consumers anticipate. Among the many CMS (Content Management System) tools, the star ally is the PIM (Product Information Management) or product content manager. With Product Information Management you can really control your content quality throughout the procedure, enrich the data, and keep it updated on all the platforms and channels. To the ecommerce site platform, the Amazon account, the FB shop, the business representatives, everything you can imagine, and immediately.
Equip Yourself With The Catalog Design Tools:
The look of the features of the online catalog is extremely significant in the digital world. When creating online catalogs that you can convert to other formats, share, or even print, the most powerful, widespread, and versatile tool is surely Adobe InDesign. Save extra time with the plug-in that can connect the product data directly to InDesign. With that, you can send your content saved on the PIM to the InDesign tool with the confidence that there will be no issues, and save yourself hours of designing time.
Tips For Presenting The Products In The Online Catalog:
If the objective is to show the products most attractively and visually possible, you ought to consider certain aspects when creating the online catalog:
- Should you do the product photoshoot with some professional?
- Will you have to give more weight to the pictures or to the product data?
- Will you comprise more visual resources: 3D simulations and videos?
- Which background color supports the products the most?
- What type of perspective is great for showing your product?
- How many pictures will be presented for every product?
The answers will provide you extremely helpful data for acquainting how to design the product catalog. For instance, if the aim is to give consumers all accessible data about the products, a customary catalog design would be suggested. But if you want to create curiosity and ensure the catalog makes a strong impression on the user, a flipbook or an interactive lookbook might be more interesting.
How Can You Make An Integrated Product Catalog?
Follow this step by step guide for making an integrated product catalog:
Product Selection:
A PIM like the sales layer is the most flexible program you can locate for managing the products and any catalog you utilize within ecommerce. How do you create a product catalog in the sales layer? Relax, and see how quick it goes: you can simply import the data of all the products to the PIM, without any limitations, or just the info of those chosen products you desire to manage and connect to different platforms. You are free to make customized product data tables with your choice of fields and columns, according to the info you append and in any language. You can organize the products simply into whatever categories, subcategories, families, and subfamilies you want.
Designing The Product Datasheet:
Every industry has its own requirements, which is why Sales Layer Product Information Management adapts to any datasheet and product. Fill in the fields that are required for every product, link to the complementary material you contain, and switch between public and draft mode at any time. You can update and edit the product data at any time, with change control and history, for keeping the datasheets updated anywhere you require.
Homogenizing & Optimizing The Descriptions & Technical Information:
Editing product data in the online catalog might not seem difficult until you begin working on it, long hours of changing, erasing, checking, and correcting. Errors will increase if you leave this job in the hands of those who, naturally, will soon get bored with such a repetitive job. Automation program such as the Sales Layer’s Product Information Management saves on time, tedium, and errors thanks to the instant checking of the data quality in the catalog.
Thus you can be certain there’re no fields left to be filled in, no discrepancies between similar products, and that the costs of many products have been updated simultaneously, all this and with the appended bonus that a PIM, not just checks but also improves. It can improve pictures and translates them into different other languages. It can also detect what data is missing in the catalog, which then requires completing for meeting the consumers’ expectations as well as the media demands like Google.
Connecting With The Platforms:
The whole range of possibilities of the online catalog starts here. The golden vision of being capable of sending the product catalog to a lot of different sales channels simultaneously is already a reality. Once you’ve the product data organized in the Product Information Management (PIM), you can choose which tables and fields you want to connect to different other platforms, by automated data being sent in real-time and always updated: like the ecommerce platform (Magento, Shopify, and BigCommerce), marketplaces such as Amazon, Google, or ASOS or Alibaba, social networks such as Instagram or Facebook. What is more, the best-equipped Product Information Management systems comprise the connectors that are pre-configured with all the different sales channels and more.
Exporting To The PDF Format With InDesign:
A lot of online catalogs live evermore in a digital world. However, it is frequently helpful for a company to be capable of designing and exporting the catalogs for saving as PDF: for sharing with people or external businesses, or print for enabling distributing catalogs in the paper version. Exporting to the other files can reason many issues if the program isn’t able to transform any stored data or table format automatically.
A PIM system permits you to make CSV and Excel files with the content you choose from the catalog, just a simple click away and without requiring utilizing a separate file conversion system. If you desire to make catalogs for exporting to PDF, the Sales Layer provides a unique plug-in for sending the product content directly from the PIM to InDesign and saving the design team a lot of time of work.
What Types Of Publishing Processes Are There?
Once the catalog layout is accepted, one of the vital steps starts the publishing procedure. It consists of adding the data into a catalog in a structured manner. This step can be accomplished manually or utilizing the automatic program. We’re talking about:
- Automatic Publishing: On-premises/in-house program (such programs are extremely costly, and layouts are hard to make; support is a paid service)
- Manual Publishing: Copy & paste (it needs much time and is prone to issues)
- Cloud Publishing Services: Cloud program or SaaS (reasonably priced, layouts are entirely editable, and support is coma pride in the project cost).
The Manual Publishing Procedure:
First, let’s begin with the manual publishing procedure. Making the catalog manually contains copying & pasting all the info, piece by piece, from the info source into the doc. It’s something that can take up a resource (outsourced or in-house) for a long time, numerous weeks or months, relying on how many pages/articles have to be made. Another significant element to contemplate when you have to create a catalog is the high chance of issues, because of the fact that a human drives this procedure and not a machine. The automatic publishing procedure was born to prevail over such drawbacks.
The Automatic Publishing Procedure:
The terminology automatic publishing refers to plug-in/software solutions that permit the users to import the product info automatically from a database/datasheet into a doc being made. These are solutions that have to be installed on the computer, like classic programs. Each PC requires its own program license. When you need to paginate, you can just work on a computer where the program has been installed previously. Such apps permit us to make docs in a particular format, or as a PDF. Just some of them enable us to make files in Adobe InDesign formats (IDML, and/or INDD, etc.).
Cloud-Based Publishing:
Lastly, a cloud-based publishing program is the one you can utilize online. Such packages need no setup, and you can use them using a common browser such as Mozilla Firefox or Google Chrome. A lot of software companies have found that Cloud technology is an excellent method of reducing software prices, boosting product innovation, and improving support for consumers.
The automatic publishing program has found in the Cloud a great place where it can simply grow. Companies such as Pagination permit you to make the docs online, totally on your own, anywhere, and anytime, with no requirement of installing the program or have any particular competencies. For setting up the project, you require just to share a few samples of the data (CSV, or Excel, etc.) and the kind of doc you desire to make (InDesign or PDF format) automatically.
Final Thoughts:
The catalog will always be a primary point. Do not ever stop: keep on looking and collecting as much data as possible about the consumers, their impressions and feedback of the online catalog, the kind of traffic the catalog can draw, and on what social media or media it’s been shared a lot. Now that you already acquaint how to create an excellent product catalog, you are better equipped for creating it to have quicker launch times. Make certain message and design go hand in hand, and move up a little by testing the automation magic for the catalog design and management.
