At the heart of every amazing shopping experience lies product catalog and discovery, connecting customers with the products they need (or didn’t know they needed). In the second installment of our beginner’s guide to digital capabilities, we explore the nuts and bolts of product catalog and discovery. What’s more, explore how commercetools supports every step in this process, from data modeling to product search.
An introduction
When “product discovery” comes to mind, we usually think about the process and tools that help customers find, explore and select products that meet their needs or desires within an online shopping environment. Oftentimes, product discovery is used interchangeably with “product search.”
That said, product discovery is a comprehensive category encompassing all the processes, tools and strategies that make products discoverable, accessible and desirable to customers. It goes beyond just search functionality, including a broader range of activities that ensure products are presented effectively and aligned with customer needs and preferences throughout the shopping journey, from product catalog management to shopping lists.
For instance, product catalog management is essential for effectively making products discoverable. It ensures that all product information — such as descriptions, images, categories, and attributes — is well-organized, accurate and easy to navigate. A well-managed catalog is a foundation for delivering relevant and reliable product data to customers, and essential for building trust and driving purchases.
Trends in all things product catalog and discovery
The evolution of product discovery is deeply tied to advancements in product catalog management and Product Information Management (PIM). These solutions enable businesses to centralize and manage complex product data, ensuring accuracy and consistency across all channels. Not only does this significantly reduce errors, but it also lays the foundation for effective AI-powered personalization. For instance, 79% of customers say they would find it helpful for AI to understand their specific needs and recommend products accordingly.
Rich media integration and dynamic asset management are also transforming product discovery. High-quality images, videos and AR-enhanced visuals enhance customer engagement and conversions. Additionally, features like voice and visual search, powered by robust product catalog data, simplify the shopping process, and are becoming increasingly popular among tech-savvy customers.
Product discovery is also going omnichannel as shoppers expect to find their desired products wherever they are — online, mobile, social or any other channel they’re engaging in the moment. To succeed, brands and retailers need to offer a consistent product discovery experience across all channels, allowing customers to seamlessly transition between devices and platforms.
On the search front, visual search capabilities are becoming increasingly important, enhancing the user experience and making products more findable. Services such as Circle to Search powered by Google Lens, which enable shoppers to search and find items that caught their eye, will raise the bar in visual search. For brands and retailers to succeed, they need to invest in high-quality images. Moreover, voice search is also expected to grow: Voice commerce sales are expected to reach $80 billion USD annually by 2025.
Leveraging product catalog and discovery with commercetools
When working with a best-of-breed technology stack, many systems (PIM, ERP, Commerce, etc.) share product information, so scores of companies still find it challenging to leverage accurate data to enable outstanding shopping experiences.
Integrating and managing product data efficiently for your digital commerce channels is a foundational component of commercetools Composable Commerce, providing you with capabilities and best practices to model, customize and manage your product data according to your business needs.
At a glance, you can seamlessly access and manage all of your product data through a versatile, dynamic interface that easily handles even the most complex catalogs. You can also configure custom views of product lists and product details and verify, edit, approve or reject pending changes on products. In a nutshell, you can easily manage your product information in just a few clicks.
💡 Check our best practice guide for integrating product data.Product data modeling is the process of creating a structured representation of a company’s product information, including attributes, descriptions, specifications and relationships between different products and components. It serves as a blueprint for organizing, storing and managing product data within a centralized system.
This structured approach enables businesses to efficiently manage, update and distribute accurate product information across various channels, enhancing data quality, streamlining processes and ultimately improving the customer experience in eCommerce and other product-related operations.
You have all the flexibility you need to design your product information model and store your product content in commercetools Composable Commerce, which is customizable and adaptable to your needs. With our capabilities, you can:
Define product types and attributes, such as product names, descriptions and images. As you can see in the image above, Product Types contain Attribute Definitions. Attributes are passed on to Products and Product Variants. Finally, Products and all their Product Variants are assigned to Categories.
Group products into any number of categories, establish category hierarchies and create product-to-category relationships to help shoppers easily find what they need.
Create an assortment or selection of products to include or exclude for a certain brand, region, market or country. With Product Tailoring, you can manage market-specific product data for optimized localization efforts.
Organize, centralize and distribute product imagery, audio and video throughout your commerce experience. You can also enrich your image catalog by including granular content for specific product types and attributes.
Manage large amounts of data with import and export capabilities. You can bulk import product data through a CSV upload in the Merchant Center or the Import API, as well as export product data to a CSV file.
Eager to dive deeper?
With our search-related features, you can enhance product discoverability through your digital storefront. Powered by advanced indexing and query features, commercetools’ search capabilities can help your customers find products efficiently, whether they’re browsing a broad category or searching for something highly specific.
Business users can leverage flexible search parameters such as full-text search, filters, facets and sorting options to tailor search results to customer preferences and business goals. This ensures that customers are presented with the most relevant products that align with their needs and shopping behavior.
You can also leverage advanced features like product suggestions and auto-complete functionality, improving search accuracy and driving discovery. For example, customers can receive intelligent suggestions based on partial inputs, misspellings or synonyms, reducing friction in their search journey.
Additionally, the API-first approach allows seamless integration of search capabilities into omnichannel experiences, making it easy for business users to maintain consistency across web, mobile and in-store applications.
💡 Find best practices for enhancing product discovery experiences in this guide.Extensibility: Move beyond out-of-the-box features with API extensibility to support cutting-edge use cases for complex product catalogs and discovery, including product bundles.
Localization: Tailor product catalogs and discovery processes to regional markets with powerful internationalization tools, ensuring relevance and engagement across global audiences.
Omnichannel shopping: Deliver a unified customer experience with one product catalog available across online, in-store and mobile channels.
Managing your product catalog and discovery in the Merchant Center
commercetools’ business tooling, the Merchant Center, enables marketers, content managers and business users to manage and run product catalogs and discovery processes without having to rely on technical teams.
For starters, you can create, edit and delete Product Types and Attributes. You can also group Attributes to better organize related Attributes and ease data enhancement workflows.
With Product List, you can manage and search for Products in your Project, as well as view and edit product details, publish and unpublish products in bulk and export products. Plus, you can search through your products using the powerful search and filters in the view. Using advanced product search, you can find products more easily, including functions like products that were last modified, according to specific fields, Product Types or Attributes.
The Review Modified Products screen provides a list of all Products with differences between their published (current) and staged versions. It allows you to examine pending changes and take actions such as publishing, discarding, reverting or editing specific updates.
In addition, Product Selections helps you manage individual assortments for multiple sales channels, from brand sites to brick-and-mortar stores. This feature also allows you to create blocklists that exclude products or variants from a certain store/channel/market.
Product Tailoring goes a step further by allowing you to manage market-specific product data for different brands or regions. That means you can tailor product information such as product names, descriptions, attributes and more for each market on the Merchant Center while keeping a centralized product catalog for your business.
Get started with the most versatile platform for product catalog and discovery
commercetools’ ability to manage complex product catalogs and discovery scenarios — such as detailed product data modeling, region-specific assortments and omnichannel consistency — ensures your brand can deliver exceptional customer experiences at scale. This empowers both developers and marketers to efficiently manage and optimize product data to meet the unique demands of your business and customers.
Brands like Christie Cookie Co., CHRONEXT, Interflora UK, SPORT 24 and Woolworths rely on commercetools’ robust product catalog and discovery capabilities to streamline operations and build customer loyalty.
With commercetools, your business can create highly flexible and dynamic product catalogs, delivering accurate and localized product information that enables customers to find and buy your products without friction.
To enrich your product catalog and discovery capabilities with commercetools, get in touch with our experts.
Manuela Marques Tchoe is a Content Writer at commercetools. She was a Content and Product Marketing Director at conversational commerce provider tyntec. She has written content in partnership with Facebook, Rakuten Viber and other social media platforms.