Definition: Catalog Management

What is catalog management?

In retail, catalog management is the process of organising, updating and maintaining central product catalogs that contain uniform product information for companies.

Accurate and consistent product information is key to retail sales, but maintaining and updating product catalogs across multiple sales channels can be tedious. Catalog management provides an efficient solution to this problem by centralising the management of product information.

There are many approaches to catalog management, but the most important aspects are:

• Data organisation: all product information and digital assets are stored in an easily accessible central database — also known as a "single source of truth" — that all stakeholders can work with.

• Content update: The data stored in the database is constantly updated to add, edit or remove products or relevant information as needed to ensure accuracy and timeliness.

• Taxonomy: Standard naming conventions and categorisation structures are used to logically organise related products and make it easier for anyone to navigate and search the catalog.

• Workflow: Processes are put in place to review and approve catalog changes to ensure quality control by the right stakeholders.

• Syndication: The centralised catalog content is synchronised and distributed to various sales channels such as websites and marketplaces or prepared for printing. This process can be manual or automated.

With catalog management, retailers can optimise the shopping experience for customers. With accurate and up-to-date product data in the catalog, retailers can ensure that customers have access to relevant and optimised product information tailored to their chosen sales channel. Whether online or in-store, customers benefit from being able to easily search, view detailed specifications and make informed purchasing decisions. For retailers, catalog management saves time by streamlining data updates and allowing channel-specific catalogs to be maintained efficiently and easily without duplication of effort. This unified approach improves the customer experience while reducing operational complexity for retailers.

Product information management (PIM) systems provide a centralised solution for catalog management, which also offers the ability to optimise and enrich product information and adapt product information in the catalog to the needs of the target audience and format — a important feature for omnichannel retailers.