Product catalog evaluation

What makes a "good" product catalog?

The purpose of an e-commerce site is clear: to sell products or, more rarely, services online. The main difference between an e-commerce site and a storefront, for example, is the existence of a product catalog, enabling customers and web users to access and order all the products on the site in just a few clicks.

An e-commerce site that "works" is first and foremost one that succeeds in presenting visitors with a quality product catalog. Before talking about customer knowledge and explaining why it's essential for improving catalog quality, a basic question needs to be asked: what is a quality product catalog?

The most obvious answer is that a good catalog is one that offers quality products that interest Internet users. That's the right answer. Except that the most important thing is that the products appeal to visitors/web surfers/customers.

But, in the context of an online store, the quality of a catalog is not only determined by the quality of the products themselves. Other factors also need to be taken into consideration:

• The product catalog must be clear and well-organized: theinternaute customer must be able to quickly access the product he is looking for. The relevance of the navigation system within your site's catalog is one of the keys to the quality of the user experience in e-commerce.
• Products must be correctly described and presented. By definition, an Internet user visiting an e-commerce site cannot touch and see the store's products in person. He doesn't really have them in front of him. That's why it's essential to optimize your product pages as much as possible, in order to provide Internet users/customers with as much information as possible. This means writing a precise description and using presentation images.
• Some products need to be adaptable, depending on criteria such as color or size (for clothing, for example). The richness of a catalog derives in part from the wealth of possible variations for each product.

If you want to improve your catalog, you need to work on all these aspects. But how do you prioritize your improvement work? You probably already know that working on your catalog is a particularly time-consuming activity.

That's why we're integrating two tools into your store that will enable you to check that you haven't forgotten a particular item in your catalog. These two tools are Catalog Monitoring and Catalog Evaluation.