Statistics reveal that 65% of the products sold on eCommerce platforms are returned due to mistakes from the entrepreneur themselves, and approx 22% of customers claim that they returned their product because it wasn’t portrayed online accurately.
eCommerce players need to weed out catalog management challenges at the earliest to focus on controlling the return rates, offering top-notch services to the customers, and increasing repurchases.
However, catalog management is a tricky task. Here you’ll get to know what are the challenges that eCommerce sellers face in catalog management and how catalog processing services can help overcome them.
Challenge 1: Catalog Management Requires Regular Update
The eCommerce marketplace is dynamic and going through a systematic change, with new rules, regulations, guidelines, tax regimes, limitations, price, specifications, composition, and packaging of the products fluctuating continuously.
In such a dynamic scenario, merchants have to update the catalog consistently to provide correct and accurate information to the customers. Failing to update the catalog according to announced changes can result in hefty fines.
Every single day, merchants have to spend a significant amount of time to fine-tune their products and list them accurately. This is the ‘precious time’ taken away from other crucial tasks such as marketing, sales, operations, and, most importantly, customer satisfaction. By outsourcing your catalog processing services, you can easily save this productive time and utilize it in revenue-generating tasks.
Challenge 2: Optimizing Content to Lower Return Rates
22% of customers accepted that they returned products because they weren’t portrayed accurately online; this stat puts a focus on catalog processing. Statistics also reveal a hidden opportunity that can be capitalized on by improving the catalog. Writing down rich, consistent, and accurate content is no easy task. It requires traversing consistently to ensure error-free content.
If you lack expertise in product catalog management, you should outsource eCommerce catalog content management services.
Why is Controlling Return Rate Essential?
- The return rate affects the overall customer experience.
- Both sellers, as well as the marketplace, lose money when a product is returned.
- Every return upscale your competitor.
- The rise in churn rate.
How Can Return Rates be Controlled?
- Traversing catalog and removing errors and inaccurate information.
- Label all the products correctly.
- Proper categorization of products.
- Remove misplaced attribute values.
- Normalization & Standardization.
Challenge 3: Duplicate Listing
The growth in eCommerce marketplaces has got business merchants competing among themselves, sometimes for more sales while other times for organic ranking. While the competition is healthy and provides sellers with the best prices, delivery options, and after-sales services, even then, some sellers are trying to trick the system.
These days, sellers are trying to rank higher over competitors by creating a duplicate listing. eCommerce platforms do not allow online sellers to create a new list when other sellers already have that same list of products.
And, selling under the old list requires excessive efforts to rank higher!
Why is a Duplicate Listing Harmful?
Through duplicate listing, sellers with low-quality products and ratings can rank higher and receive orders. When these sellers with low ranking fail to fulfill orders on time, the overall customer experience falls, and the marketplace suffers.
With a duplicate listing, there are chances that apart from customer experience, fake product delivery will also increase. Since these listings are duplicate and unauthentic, and often offer substantial discounts, they fail to deliver qualitative products, which leads to a spike in return rates.
Challenge 4: Normalization and Standardization
Usually, customers as the key differentiator use the price and brand of the products. For their ease, the eCommerce marketplace needs to offer a similar experience at all touchpoints.
It is essential to ensure that catalogs of all SKUs are updated in a similar standardized format. By following a standard, it will turn out more accessible for customers to find the products they are looking for.
Normalization and Standardization help retailers in offering customers a similar experience at all touchpoints. For eCommerce platforms reviewing all products to ensure a particular standard is followed through every catalog is vital. This can happen when eCommerce implements normalization and standardization in the system.
Following standardized guidelines is a tricky task, to match catalog standards it requires the expertise of experts.
Challenge 5: Scaling SKUs Without Affecting Catalog Quality
A well-established marketplace must add new products to retain existing customers, the addition of new products on the site not only encourages customers to spend more time but also increases the conversion rate.
eCommerce marketplace requires an immense focus on logistics, payment security, and inventory management, which leave sellers with no time to focus on catalog management. Sellers can outsource eCommerce catalog management services to third parties and meet their scaling demand.
Reliance on an expert can help sellers pass percentages, improve product listing, and also offer better search functionality.
Challenge 6: Misplaced Attribute Values
Usually, in the eCommerce platform, products are labeled with attribute values, which is either inaccurate or added deliberately to drive exposure. Incorrect or intentionally added attribute values is a challenge because these values can influence search results.
When non-real products get labeled of established brands, they start appearing in results instead of original products, and customers end up buying products that are neither original nor required.
How to Solve Misplaced Attribute Value Issues
With the help of content enrichment services, eCommerce sellers can remove the unwanted or inaccurate attribute values and can control brand interference. This process can help customers in making an informed decision.
Catalog enrichment makes the product discovery faster and easier, which directly leads to an increase in sales.
Conclusion
The changing dynamics of e-commerce requires sellers to buckle up to pursue a series of changes. It is the right time for e-commerce sellers to look out for third parties for help. By outsourcing eCommerce catalog management services, sellers can reduce the challenges of catalog management and focus on business expansion.
Catalog processing, catalog enrichment, catalog quality check, and product discovery services can help e-commerce sellers handle these catalog management challenges with ease and grace.
e-commerce website – DepositPhotos
