6 Steps Involved in Catalog Product Upload – Explained!

Do you want to know how online shopping sites manage to upload products in huge numbers smoothly? Well, they follow a detailed process for uploading their product on the sites. You have to know the steps involved in catalog product upload if you want to mimic the process. Also, following a series of steps will help you to cover everything in the uploading process.

After the Covid-19 pandemic, the growth of e-commerce has rapidly increased over the quarters. Can you guess what is the reason that facilitates the growth? Yes! You guessed it right! Customers experience better in terms of shopping on online websites than offline shopping. For this reason, during the first quarter of 2019, US e-commerce sales hit $137.7 billion, which has created a record.

Having an attractive product catalog is a useful way to attract customers on e-commerce websites. You can manipulate the purchase decisions of the customers with the help of an attractive product catalog. But for that, you need to accumulate all product data and create something meaningful to attract potential customers.

In this blog, you will find some steps involved in catalog product upload to manage products better. The reasons why you need a product catalog or catalog management system will also be explored in this piece.

Let’s start with a clear understanding of the product catalog first!

A product catalog is nothing but a list of products that helps customers find the products and their details. These details include product description, product features, price, color, availability, reviews, and many more. Usually, a product catalog helps customers make their purchasing decisions. There, online businesses majorly focus on making their product catalog efficient and robust.

Suppose you want to purchase a book from an online marketplace so what would you like to do? You may first search for the book in the search bar or you may find the book by going through the manual process. The website will provide you with all the information about your book. The information includes the book name, author name, publisher’s details, and many more. All this happened because the website has followed the steps involved in catalog product upload thoroughly.

Online businesses create product catalogs not only for the customer’s use but also for other stakeholders. You can consider a product catalog as a communication tool that works wonders in B2B and B2C domains. Moreover, an efficient product catalog helps in providing a better customer experience and increases conversion rates.

As businesses make product catalogs for the stakeholders thus they act as a communication tool between them. The product catalog smoothly passes information between external and internal stakeholders. Interestingly, customers are the stakeholder group and thus they receive product information smoothly through the product catalog. With product catalogs, businesses do not have to rely more on emails to provide customers with information.

Imagine yourself as a customer and you need to purchase something online. You visited a website where you saw that the products were not in their accurate format. Would you make a purchase there? It’s obviously NO! On the other hand, if you see a website that is entirely organized then it’s likely you make a purchase there. By following the steps involved in catalog product upload, businesses can influence customers like you. In short, businesses can provide customers with a better experience with product catalogs.

Proving all information over mail is an old idea, which increases the business cycle. Replacing the old idea with product catalogs will help businesses to minimize the business cycle. With product catalogs, customers can find all the products digitally in one place. There is no need to search for the product at all, which will boost the conversion rate along minimize the business cycle.

What does a customer through when he/she comes to a shopping website? Well, a customer comes to buy something from the website. If businesses can provide the customer with all information seamlessly then it is likely the customer make a purchase. Here, the product catalog plays the most vital role in providing the customers with information. Eventually, the product catalog also helps in enhancing customer conversion rates.

The process of catalog creation and uploading product details on it is quite complex. That’s why online businesses nowadays rely on product catalog processing services to manage it better. However, you need to follow a step-by-step approach if you want to make the product catalog by yourself. In this section, you will find the list of 7 simple steps, which will help you in making the product catalog.

The first step to initiate the product category starts with gathering information and making a clean database. Data accuracy is paramount when it comes to making a product catalog. Besides accuracy, you need to take care of data completeness because you cannot make a product catalog with incomplete data. For this, you can initiate a data cleansing process before making the product catalog.

The data cleansing process will remove redundancy, duplicate files, incomplete datasets, and errors from the file. Besides data cleansing, you can incorporate a data enrichment process to prepare the catalog. The steps involved in catalog product upload include the right amount of data inside the catalog.

With both data enrichment and data cleansing processes, you can ensure your product catalog is organized well. You can provide better shopping experiences to your customers if you integrate organized and accurate datasets in your product catalog. Besides providing the best experience, it will also help in gaining the trust of the customers.

If you are ready with your organized data then you must start the next process, which is template creation.

To make the product data attractive, you need to take the help of a template. Creating a template helps in managing the consistency and efficiency of the products that you will upload to the catalog in the catalog management system. You can create a template for a product catalog in two different ways; one, by designing the template, and two, by streamlining the product data.

Nowadays, businesses can have ready-made catalog templates available online for making product catalogs. But it’s always the best approach to make your custom template for the product catalog. However, you can follow the steps involved in catalog product upload template with an outsourcing agency that provides catalog product upload services. Here are a few things that you need to follow while creating the customs template for the product catalog.

First, you need to select the perfect effective catalog design layout for your custom template. The structure of the layout must support all the details of the product including images, pricing, descriptions, etc. With the help of a well-organized layout, customers can easily navigate your products.

Second, you have to incorporate the company’s logo and theme across all your products to increase your brand’s visibility. Creating a unique visual identity for your brand will make your brand different from the rest. A distinct product catalog will also help in creating a strong visual identity for your brand.

Thirdly, you must always opt for a flexible approach while creating the template. Online businesses are prone to adopt changes thus you need to be flexible enough to accommodate that. Flexible product catalog templates will help in accommodating changes.

Besides effective catalog design, timely updating of the data plays a big role in e-commerce catalog management. The steps involved in catalog product upload focus more on streamlining the product data. To streamline the data, all you need to do is carefully upload the accurate data. To have accurate datasets, you can initiate a data cleansing process to eliminate different forms of errors.

Earlier people used to check products online from their computer systems but now they can check it from their smartphones. Therefore, you have to create a product catalog that can easily load on mobile applications. To create a mobile-friendly product catalog, you need to check attribute mapping first. Arrtubute maps ensure all the products capture the right place in the product catalog along with the catalog templates.

The process of attribute mapping is essential; without this, the product catalog may confuse potential customers. However, the process of attribute mapping is not simple that’s where businesses take help from outsourcing. Proper validation of catalog product data is essential in the attribute mapping process. The outsourcing company will efficiently check the process and ensure no errors while working on the attribute mapping through catalog product upload services.

Understanding categorization and taxonomy rules are the important steps involved in catalog product upload method. Attribute mapping helps companies reduce click numbers in the fastest possible way. Creating product hierarchy is the aim of attribute mapping, which puts the products into different categories with effective catalog design. Therefore, customers get the product with just a few clicks

Suppose you want to buy a lunch box online and you come across two different websites. One website has every detail about lunch boxes but does not contain any image in that image. On the other hand, another website sells the same lunch box with its original image. Now, which one do you think is more convincing? For sure, you will buy your lunch box from the second website. The reason is very clear, which is the image of the lunch box.

Therefore, you need to consider product images when you think about creating a product catalog. The first step of optimizing the product image starts with resizing the image in the appropriate dimension. Above all, you need to add the image appropriately so that it doesn’t create a load on the website. Sometimes heavy images make the website slow to load and damage visual appeal.

Image compression steps involved in catalog product upload where you have to compress the image without affecting its quality. Compressed images increase the performance of the website and reduce its loading time. Besides compression, you have to use an accurate format for the picture. Choose JPEG if the image is complex or choose PNG for graphic content.

Tagging the image using Alt tags plays a critical role in image optimization. These tags help visually impaired people understand what is in the image. However, alt image works wonders as an SEO technique to increase searchability. Use proper keywords while describing the content of your image in Alt tags to increase website visibility.

Before uploading the product information to the product catalog, you need to validate al using the catalog management process. The process of validating the catalog product data for the product catalog includes performing the cleansing process, eliminating errors, and controlling the quality. Checking all steps involved in catalog product upload is necessary and you cannot leave data validation here.

Checking the data becomes essentially important when the data does not meet the quality standards. With the incorporation of the data validation process, businesses can easily eliminate the data errors. Thus, it would make the product catalog efficient and error-free so it can help customers to view products. Eventually, the data cleansing process will improve the quality of the data and reduce the chances of errors.

After validating the data, it’s time to upload the products with the help of the catalog management process. Businesses usually upload product data in bulk because it is more convenient and efficient than others. Bulk uploading steps involved in catalog product upload help businesses migrate huge chunks of data easily.

While uploading the product data in bulk, you need to map the data in the corresponding fields in the catalog management system. Aligning the data in the accurate frame is important and mapping helps in doing that. Besides that, testing the catalog product data is also important to validate it appropriately. Testing and validation help prevent incorrect information from getting published live.

Lastly, managing inventory is also a part of some essential steps involved in catalog product upload. Aligning inventory with the catalog helps businesses avoid overselling items or running out of stock. Once it gets synchronized then it will efficiently balance the product inventory with sales. Moreover, to manage the product catalog better, you can also think about outsourcing. The catalog product upload services outsourcing agency will take care of all these steps with an effective catalog management process.