CatalogsBuilder

As business owners build and expand their ecommerce portfolio of products, it is important to ask the following question – Do all products behave similarly on the ecommerce domain? or are there specific patterns to how they behave over time. 

Product Life Cycle is nothing but the trajectory of a product’s sales across its lifetime. 

The life-cycle is divided into 4 stages: 

1. Introduction
2. Growth
3. Maturity
4. Decline

1. Introduction

This is the stage of where the product performance gives insights in market research. It is important to identify the who/what /where/when/how & how much for the customers at this stage. Rapid prototyping may be required at this stage with the product. The idea is to fail fast with a new product. 

Catalog management at this stage will mean experimenting with pictures and videos, identifying which SKUs work & improving descriptions rapidly. There are many tools that are available to make this task easy but CatalogsBuilder happens to be the simplest and easy-to-use ecoomerce catalog management tool that helps you build a strong foundation in product life-cycle management. 

2. Growth

This is the stage of rapid growth in sales of the product via customer acquisition. This may require the customer to rapidly play with prices as a marketing initiative & scale up inventory across ecommerce platforms and physical locations. The goal here is to build ecommerce presence to scale for a rapidly selling product.

3. Maturity

This phase requires sustenance of market share for the product. It is important to evolve the value proposition for the product at this time and rationalize the various SKU offerings accordingly. From a catalog standpoint, this time can be used to prioritize SKUs accordingly. 

4. Decline

The decline of a particular product may mean the emergence of another. It is important to strategically Pivot the offerings to manage the decline of a product smoothly. Eventual decommissioning of the product and yet maintaining the backend data for the same via catalog management will help you analyze the handling of the product at a later stage to draw learnings for future products. 

Now let us understand how a typical business will be able to leverage the above steps to manage their catalogs better. A common example is that of seasonal products like winter clothing/cosmetic products. 

1. Introduction: Many products with various SKU combinations would be uploaded at the beginning of the season. The presentation of the same will be altered rapidly basis product performance and customer feedback. The non-performing products/SKUs would be removed so as not to confuse the consumers. 
2. Growth: As winter sets in, the business would be able to identify and focus on the successful products of the season. Now is the time to grow the winners quickly. This would require close monitoring of prices and inventory, as well as rationalizing the product presentation via competitor benchmarking. 
3. Maturity: As the winter months progress, sellers will work on the patterns from the sales to understand the value proposition of the product. Now is the time to keep the product competitive in the ecommerce space and further improve on the SKU mix. Some low-performing SKUs can be moved to the next stage quickly.
4. Decline: As the winter months pass, most of the products will see a major decline in sales. It is important to identify these products and de-list the same so as to keep your ecommerce operations nimble. Decommissioning the product from the ecommerce platform may not mean the removal of the base data as well, as you will still need to re-commission some of the products at the beginning of the next season. 

CatalogsBuilder is the simplest tool in the market to help you create, curate, and iterate your e-commerce catalogs. It helps you execute the above product life-cycle strategy across multiple e-commerce stores with ease. CatalogsBuilder tool has been built by a team of experts who have cut their teeth working across major e-commerce players in the USA, Europe, and Asian markets with 15+ years of experience in the industry.