Do you know how much time your prospects spend on product research before buying? What influences their decisions? Successful sales in much depend on how well your online store’s product management is handled. In this post, we’ll introduce you to PM in eCommerce and give you hands-on advice on building and strengthening your PM strategy.
Product Management in eCommerce: What it’s About and Why it Matters
Having a person responsible for managing the products of your eCommerce website is very important. At times, there’s even more than one Product Manager, segmented by product spheres.
It’s not just merchandising that’s taken into account. Not only do such people work on developing new product lines, analyze the market, and keep an eye out on the trends, but they also conduct research on how to make your products better. All of this is needed to boost conversion rates, grow sales, and to build trust.
How PM differs in eCommerce and what makes up the process
Unlike regular physical store management, additionally, PMs in eCommerce make sure that the sold items are presented online at their best and within the appropriate time frames. It is their responsibility to monitor the overall product content quality, visualization, and keep product information updated and relevant as well.
Furthermore, product managers can run tests and study user behaviour on the website, for instance, using A/B testing they can find those CTAs that are optimal for the given audience. The same applies to tactics for improving user experience, optimizing navigation, and parts of the product checkout.
Mentioning those areas of the online retail store that should be given additional attention, these are the:
• Product search
• Simple navigation
• Shopping cart/bag
• Checkout steps and available payment methods
• Product content
• Shipping options
• SEO data
• The store’s mobile version
• Multichannel online presence (including social media)
Product Management Strategy for eCommerce Done Right
Having a well-planned and thought-through strategy for product management is crucial. Below we give you the main points to note.
1. Study your audience
It goes without saying that you should know who your customers are like the back of your hand. Do everything possible to learn everything you can about your potential buyers and even put together their customer portrait. Find out about what they like, log which items they tend to buy in pairs, how they behave as they browse your store.
By having a detailed layout of who you’re selling to, it becomes much easier to “connect” with your audience, sell more, and grow your business.
2. Equip yourself with the right tools to stay organized
Having your product inventory neat and organized is indeed a priority. Controlling stocks and availability is one side of the deal, adding and updating data is another. As the online retail store expands, it becomes more and more difficult to manage if done manually. This is exactly why it’s vital to have top-notch tools to manage the lifecycle of your products. And spreadsheets or Excel documents are certainly not the best options.
You need to keep track of all the payments also. There are seller tools that can help you find the transaction cost for each transaction.
Your toolset will vary based on the platform that your store is based on. Generally, apart from the built-in solutions provided by the platform, other optimal functionality will be plugged into the store by your eCommerce website developers.
3. Boost your store’s search and navigation
In much, the success and ease of navigation and search lie in the way you categorize your products and how well you place them in the architecture of your eCommerce store. This can help you stay organized, plus it’ll allow users and search engines to find what they need quickly.
Speaking of the top site megamenu, in an ideal case scenario, any of your product pages should be available somewhere between a maximum of three-four clicks. This is a screenshot of the official Chevrolet website menu. As you can see, any available vehicle model can be found in just three clicks.
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| The top menu of the Chevrolet website |
What’s for other ways to improve and speed up your search bar and overall product navigation, make sure that your store’s developers have set up all the needed plugins for performance optimization, that your categories are well laid out, as well as that all product filters function properly. If you crave for adding on advanced technology, voice search is among the features that are accelerating in eCommerce.
4. Add images of outstanding quality
Pictures speak much brighter than words, therefore, when it comes to your product management, pay additional attention to the images. Importantly, they should be well-formatted and optimized in terms of their weight and size, otherwise, they’ll lead to the slowdowns of your page load. Professionally taken pictures of products, the opportunity to zoom them, videos, or some other visual features are currently in trend on eCommerce websites. By the way, don’t forget about image naming and change it to something with your brand and product name.
Take a look at the gallery of the Decollete Hi-heels Skull shoes on the official Philipp Plein website. Interestingly, it has 360-degree product image rotation functionality that is quite neat.
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| Product gallery on the Philipp Plein website |
5. Craft product descriptions that sell
For starters, the least you can do is avoid copying and pasting the descriptions that you have already used. Although the harm of this is quite obvious, this occurs too commonly. Not only is this bad for SEO, but it also doesn’t help your customers. And keeping in mind that these texts bring a lot of value to your clients, think twice if you plan to ignore the descriptions of your products.
There’s so much that can be used: wordplay, creative and catchy texts, enlisting the unique and strong points of the product, how to use them, FAQs, among other things. Moreover, don’t forget to make your message personal by addressing your users with “you”.
Below is a screenshot of the Solaire Peau Parfaite Sunscreen product page taken from the official Yves Rocher website. In the description, we can see personalization by the use of pronouns like “your”, the product’s environmental eco and vegan qualities, as well as the listed benefits block “It’s +”, and other details.
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| Product description on the Yves Rocher website |
Final Say
Wrapping up, there’s a lot to be done to manage and evolve an eCommerce store’s stock and products efficiently to grow your business. Overall, it is crucial to stay organized, to pay attention to analytics and trends, as well as to never stop at what you’ve achieved in terms of optimization of both the website and of what you’re selling.
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