As retail brands have moved their business online, they have also digitalised their product catalogues. A product catalogue portal is a list of all the products that a business sells, displayed on a website. The portal can be a standalone website or a part of a brand’s website.

For today’s tech-savvy customers, the portal is the first point of contact with a retail business. After customers browse through the catalogue, they can purchase the products directly on the portal or contact a sales manager to purchase them in-store.

Businesses that sell goods have vast amounts of product data to store and manage, especially if they are large-sized or growing and selling multiple products. Carrying out these processes manually can make it difficult for businesses to ensure accuracy while entering the data, and precious business time will be lost while looking for the required data. This is where using a product catalogue portal can be beneficial for them.

Following are some more benefits that the portal offers businesses and their customers:

For Businesses

• The portal is not just for sales teams and can be useful to businesses even if they don’t sell products online. It automates data entry and centralises the data, allowing different departments of a business such as marketing to have access to it.
• In today’s age of the internet and smart mobile devices, having a product catalogue portal can help to increase the reach of businesses and their products.
• Updating a physical product catalogue requires more paper to be used. A product catalogue portal helps businesses to save paper by storing and updating information in a single online location.
• Businesses can save money on hiring and training salespeople to assist customers in-store. They can also save valuable office space that might otherwise have been taken up by multiple bundles of paper catalogues.
• The portal helps businesses to gain customer trust, increase customer retention, reduce returns, improve reputation, increase referrals, and increase profits.
• Online catalogues are secure as they are Cloud-based unlike paper-based catalogues

For Customers

• Customers want to be able to touch and feel products before purchasing them, which online shopping does not allow. An online product catalogue cannot eliminate this disadvantage, but it can help customers to gain an in-depth understanding of products by providing detailed product descriptions along with images and videos from multiple angles highlighting various features of products.
• Customers will be able to compare products side by side on the catalogue, see the product availability status in real time, and make better purchase decisions.
• Customers can spend less time browsing through and selecting products to purchase on the catalogue than in a physical store.
• The aforementioned benefits can help to improve customer experience and satisfaction.

REVALSYS’S PRODUCT CATALOGUE PORTAL

Revalsys designed an in-store product catalogue portal for one of India’s leading fashion brands for men, women, and children. The portal speeds up the shopping process for customers by using their location data to offer them recommendations for outfits from their nearest outlets of the brand. The project scope was completed in two phases:

Phase I

This phase involved designing the portal for the brand’s customers with the following features:

• Customers are given a QR code to scan and access the portal. Scanning the code displays products that are available on the portal to purchase online and in-store.
• Customers can only add the products to their wish list on the portal, for which they are required to create an account on the brand’s website or log into it using their social media credentials. The wish list on the portal is synced with that on the brand’s website.
• Customers can move the products in their wish list to the shopping bag on the brand’s website, after which they are taken to the checkout page. The checkout page displays information such as product details and images, total cart value, expected delivery date, customer information, and accepted payment methods.
• Customers have the option to complete their purchases on the brand’s website or to contact the manager of their nearest outlet to complete the purchases in-store.

Phase II

The second phase of the project involved developing an app for store managers. The app has been designed to send the managers real-time notifications with details of every product that is added to the bag from their outlet. Once the managers receive this notification, they have to update the shopping cart pages of customers with the purchase status of the products in the bag.

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