Selecting products that will succeed online is one of the keys to ecommerce.
If your catalog is small, then it’s not hard to publish your entire selection online. But if you have a wide range of products, then it’s worth getting a subset of your products up and running first. This way you’ll start seeing a return on your investment that much sooner — not to mention accruing great customer reviews and sales history.
So how do you choose which products for publish first? Let’s take a look at six key considerations.
1. Images
Great images of your products is the most important selling feature for any potential customer. It’s their first impression on a search results page, and a critical part of their decision making process.
Having multiple high resolution images of your products will dramatically improve clickthrough rates, and lifestyle photography can improve sales conversion.
Other visual assets, like dimensional line images, feature detail shots, or even video assets can further help shoppers visualize your product in their own homes.
Finding the best imagery in your catalog is a great way to narrow down your initial ecommerce offering.
Check out our Image Standards slide deck for details and examples.
2. Best sellers
Picking your best sellers, whether that’s ten products or a hundred, is the simplest way to narrow your ecommerce strategy. The best predictor of the future is the past, so if you have a particular product that flies off of showroom floors.
You’ll see more return on investment from a few top performers than from a lot of less popular listings.
3. Uninterrupted inventory
Having a continuous inventory of your ecommerce products will help them perform better. Channels don’t want their customers seeing “Out of Stock” products, so they will prioritize products that don’t run out.
If you have products that perform great seasonally, but you don’t bother stocking them the rest of the year, channels will likely deprioritize those listings.
4. Great data
Great product data is the unsung hero of many top performing ecommerce listings. Not only does a thorough data set answer any questions a potential customer may have, but ecomm channels will boost products with great data in their search results.
Bear collects a wide range of information to build best-in-class product listings. For more details, see our article on Product Data Requirements.
5. Standard options
While a highly customizable product can be a great selling feature for niche customers, it doesn’t translate well to many furniture ecommerce channels.
You can still highlight your variations — if you have imagery for a variety of upholsteries or sizes of the same product, you can offer your customers all of those options.
If, however, you sell a 3-piece sectional and your customers choose a la carte configuration from 10 possible components, you’d be better off choosing the most popular combinations and listing them as complete products.
6. Shipping-friendly
If your products are fragile, ensure your warehouses use adequate packaging to protect them through the shipping process, whether they travel by LTL or Small Parcel.
Logistics will vary by channel, but you always want to avoid the hassle of your customer receiving a damaged item. If items in your catalog are “handle with care”, they may not be the best ecommerce candidates.
Summary
Using these criteria, you can narrow down your catalog to the products most likely to succeed online. Hopefully each product on your shortlist now has great images, a proven sales record, steady inventory, thorough data, and a simple range of options.
Of course, it’s possible to succeed without covering all these bases. CommerceBear will work with you to build the best possible listings for your products. That’s what we’re here for!
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