Catalogue updating requires keeping a list of products, prices, and descriptions both current and available to browsing customers. Catalogue updating can be performed in a traditional fashion by companies that still produce and provide printed catalogues to lists of customers who order by mail, but increasing numbers of businesses are faced with challenges and difficulties in performing catalogue updating in an online environment ”“ the process of ensuring that prices, inventories, availability, images, and product descriptions presented to online shoppers contain adequate and accurate information.
Anyone who has wasted time and effort shopping on a website with poor catalogue management can testify to the frustration and exasperation of dealing with improperly provided catalogue information. It is incredibly irritating to fill up our electronic shopping cart by clicking our way through an inventory, only to realize during checkout that some of our desired products are unavailable or mispriced. Even worse, those websites with buggy back-end programming that pop up an error when we click on the check-out button, preventing us from purchasing our goods. In either case, customers are likely to simply close the page and refuse to patronize the site again while navigating to a competing provider with a more reliable site structure.
For web based enterprises that rely heavily on online consumer shopping, improper or inadequate catalogue updating can quickly lead to dramatic decreases in sales. Furthermore, online shoppers tend to have longer memories. While real world shoppers may be geographically limited in their perusals ”“ there can only be so many hardware stores per square mile ”“ online shoppers face no such limitation. As many domestic companies can affirm, online shoppers can just as easily purchase a new jacket from India, Japan, or Switzerland as they can from New York.
This massive increase in competition makes proper catalogue updating even more crucial for companies attempting to attract a loyal audience. Bad news travel fast in the online world and more than one .com company has gone under due to poor catalogue maintenance and the resulting increase in negative feedback.
For this reason, meeting the challenge of catalogue management and updating head-on should top the list of any company with a serious online offering, or that relies heavily on web traffic and sales. Ignoring or compromising on the integrity of catalogue updates is little more than corporate suicide. But the flipside is also true ”“ companies that regularly and consistently provide reliable and accurate catalogue information can find themselves quickly blessed with rapidly growing ranks of customers who are fleeing from competing sites who fail to catalogue properly.
– Data Czar @ DEO
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