The Ultimate Guide to Effective E-commerce Product Management
When running an e-commerce business, managing the products is among the most crucial responsibilities. No matter how occupied you are with your core responsibilities, you cannot bypass e-commerce product management at any cost. It’s because your store experience and sales rate depend on it!
It is true starting with a small store with minimal products might not give you that much management stress. But over time, when you increase your inventory or plan to bring in more products to sell, you will face big-time challenges in listing, categorizing, organizing, and promoting the big chunk of products.
You must know e-commerce product management isn’t a one-time task, as it demands consistent efforts alongside other business operations. It’s because every time a new product is added to the stock, you must specify the category under which it fits and list it accordingly.
Following that, you must also write the descriptions, highlight the features, seek search engine optimization for the product page and much more. Handling all of these duties alongside running the core business tasks is quite complex! Therefore, it is better to hire professional e-commerce product management services.
Upon seeking help from professionals, you will be appointed virtual assistants to look after your product upload, categorization and other such management needs. But, how do virtual assistants look out for efficient e-commerce product management? Well, to help you with an answer to that question, here’s a full guide on efficient product management.
What do You Understand by e-commerce Product Management?
Before diving deeper into how virtual assistants can help with effective e-commerce product management services, you need to understand what it actually is.
For everyone who is new to the e-commerce world, product management is a crucial process to look after the brand offerings. Some of the services that comprise the product management efforts are:
- Drafting the product details
- Uploading the products to the store
- Standardizing the product data
- Organizing and categorizing the products for better navigation, etc.
Keeping the general tasks aside, the major purpose of e-commerce product management is to boost the sales of your store through the right promotions and information conveyance. Your store management virtual assistant will help you achieve the same by analyzing the market trends and the preferences of customers.
Not only that, but you will also find yourself saving a lot of expenses as a result of improved inventory management. One of the important branches of e-commerce product management services is cataloging. You cannot expect to provide a good navigation experience to your online buyers if you haven’t categorized your products properly.
Your VAs will look out for the catalog management responsibilities, where they will organize the products and upload them under the right categories. This is important because customers might have a very low attention span. If your site fails to provide them with the products they need through standard navigation, you will lose the opportunity.
What are Some Challenges You Might Face with Product Management?
For every one of you who is just starting off with a new e-commerce business, there might be a plan to take on product management responsibilities yourself. It might be an economic approach on your end, but it will eventually trouble your store management in the long run.
To ensure product management is as efficient as it should be, you will need a specific skill set. You must have a basic insight into how online purchasing or selling works on your preferred e-commerce platform.
You must have product knowledge, communication skills, analytical proficiency, deadline consciousness and other such traits to be an effective product manager. But, as you have to look out for the technical and operational aspects of the e-commerce business, focusing on product management and its requirements might seem monotonous and time-consuming.
Some of the evident challenges that you will face while dealing with e-commerce product upload services all by yourself are:
Ensuring Good Store Experience for Customers
Listing the products isn’t a random task, as it should be properly categorized to ensure the customers can easily find what they need in your store. Therefore, without proper skills and understanding of how to categorize different products and what sub-categories would fit in, it’s difficult to ensure a good user experience.
Addressing Criticism or Negative Feedback
Remember, if you are acting as a product manager for your store, you must also look out for the criticism that any of your offerings receive. It’s important, as such feedback will help you improve the product and change the perception of customers. But, amidst the core business operations, tracking down product reviews might not be your mandatory task.
These are certain challenges that urge e-commerce business owners to delegate their e-commerce product management tasks to some outsourced experts, probably virtual assistants. But why rely on VAs to provide you with e-commerce store management services?
It is the most common question that most beginners ask! Well, the answer is well elaborated in the following section!
Why Should You Rely on an e-commerce Virtual Assistant for Your Product Management Needs?
As the competitiveness in the e-commerce industry is growing stupendously, it’s better to delegate some of the monotonous and redundant tasks to experienced professionals. But hiring new employees, especially at the start of the business, might be very expensive.
Therefore, it is advised you hire an e-commerce virtual assistant to help you with product store management tasks. From uploading data to managing inventory, everything related to the products will be handled by the store management virtual assistant.
But, to help you feel more convinced on why you should hire VAs to provide you with professional e-commerce product management services, here are some reasons to count on:
1. Cost Savings
When you hire an e-commerce virtual assistant for your product management needs, you will save a lot of money. How? Well, you won’t have to provide these remote experts with any infrastructure facility or resources. They have their own tools and software solutions to help you with hiring e-commerce product upload services.
Following that, you don’t have to pay them any employee benefits or invest in their training. The virtual assistants are already trained and experienced in order to help you with proficient store management solutions. Moreover, depending on your budget, you can either hire them for full-time or part-time.
2. Enhanced Productivity
When you have virtual assistants to offer e-commerce product management services, you will be free from the redundant tasks related to it. Thus, it means you won’t have to upload the new products, categorize them, or write descriptions for them. All of these tasks will be delegated to the VAs offering e-commerce store management services.
This way, you will have spare time to focus more on your core business operations, such as expansion, introducing new products, marketing, and other such aspects. With such sophistication, it will be easier for you to make your business more productive and successful in the long run.
3. Get Engaging Product Descriptions
As you have VAs to look after your e-commerce product upload services, be assured you are going to engage a lot of your site visitors to be on the site. It’s because when you hire an e-commerce virtual assistant, he/she won’t just deal with product listings but will also write engaging descriptions for each of them.
The remote assistants offering complete e-commerce product upload services are proficient in writing precise, appealing and informative descriptions. Such high-quality narration of features, benefits and other specifications of the products will help the customers relate. Not only that, but good quality descriptions infused with high-frequency keywords are also good for SEO.
4. Assists with Competitor Analysis
The virtual assistants providing you with e-commerce product upload services can also help you with analyzing the competition. It means they will analyze the product listings of your competitors, their descriptions and the SEO strategies used.
The VAs shall help you determine the flaws of your competitors and then strategize your product listings to excel in those areas. This way, your virtual assistants will not just manage or organize the products but will make sure you get good traffic and enhanced conversion rates.
5. Encourage Multichannel Marketing
You need to determine the channels where your customers are mostly active. May it be social media, podcasts, blogs or Google search results, your potential customers should be able to find your brand or products without fail. Your virtual assistant will help you list your products efficiently across all sales channels.
Not only that, but the VAs are also proficient in guiding you with the right marketing strategies to ensure your products get the maximum online visibility. With the right content marketing tactics embedded in the product descriptions, you can expect to draw more traffic and better conversions.
Parting Words
If you have plans on expanding your virtual assistant for e-commerce and taking it to the next level, you must act on this vision right from the beginning. Therefore, don’t hesitate to hire professional e-commerce product management services, even when you have only a handful of items to sell.
It is because a virtual assistant will not just be helping you with listing your products but will also be managing all aspects of it. May it be organizing the products, enhancing its SEO proficiency or executing product marketing strategies, a VA can help you with them all.
So, look out for the best agencies that have highly proficient VAs in their team and hire one or more to delegate your e-commerce product management tasks.