How to Introduce Your Customer to Your Product Optimize your product catalog for better B2B and B2C business. The most important role of your ecommerce platform is to show customers your product. As with anything in ecommerce, you want this process to be as easy and painless for your client as possible. Even if you have the fanciest analytics, the smoothest ERP integration, or even the best product—if you can’t effectively show the customers what you are selling, you cannot do business. As you design your product catalog, take the following into consideration to optimize your product catalog design. 1) Function First When designing any website, it is easy to get caught up in the thrills of graphic design. Libraries of fancy features and cool tricks are exciting to look through, and very tempting to put all over your product catalog. But your number one priority is to make this catalog clean and usable. It is okay to use graphics in moderation, but above all your catalog must be easy to look at, to search in, and to browse through. It is much better to have a clean, simple catalog than one that is potentially too flashy. 2) Original and Informative Product Descriptions Your product descriptions are the gateway for customers to understand what your products are, what they do, and why a customer should by them. Make sure that every product has a description, and that these descriptions are clear and detailed. If there are a lot of specific dimensions or features for a product, consider putting in an additional chart to help consumers compare between their options. Utilize tags for each product so that they can be easily searchable. Also, be sure not to copy-and-paste product descriptions from other sites, even if you have permission; Google algorithms prefer original content, and you want to do everything you can for your product to come up in a Google search. Plus, by having an original description, you can showcase why your product is one-of-a-kind. Most importantly, make sure that the price of each product is extremely visible, both when browsing through multiple products and in the descriptions themselves. You want to help your clients get the information they need 3) Product Images and Examples Because your business is operating online, your customers do not have the hands-on opportunities presented by brick-and-mortar stores. The easiest way to overcome this is through images. Provide images of each product from different angles, close-up and far away, and with any real-world examples that may help customers visualize the product in their own lives. For some products, you may also consider posting a video showing the product from all angles and its function. 4) Use categories to your advantage. Categories are extremely helpful to a consumer looking through your website. Divide your product into categories that have a logic to it, and consider offering different options for how the categories are divided. For example, a clothing retail business could have the options to view products by age/gender, and it could also have the option to view products by season. Make sure the naming of your categories is easy to understand without an explanation. If you also have a brick-and-mortar portion to your business, consider mirroring the same categories that your customers may find in stores to help them easily move between in-store and online shopping. Before you build your product catalog, sit down and think about how a customer might look for a product in your catalog and which categories could guide them along the right path. Clarity Can Help To build an ecommerce platform with a product catalog that is right for you or if you need assistance with implementing good product catalog design, contact us for a free quote today!