Why You Shouldn’t Use Excel to Make your Product Catalogs

Find out how to make a product catalog in Excel

Creating an Excel product catalog should still be of curiosity if your online business:

• Is a small enterprise or start-up, with fewer assets to put money into administration software program
• You might have a small product catalog
• You might have a compact crew
• You solely want your product catalog in a single language
• Your product catalog isn’t up to date incessantly

In the event you’re nonetheless satisfied that spreadsheets are the product catalog system for you, there are some important steps you possibly can take to create a easy beginning base.

1. Outline your catalog construction.
   What number of classes do you want and what number of columns are you going to work with?
2. Add pictures from an exterior server.
   Including pictures to a spreadsheet manually is a sluggish activity, though you possibly can put hyperlinks into an area folder or listing. There isn’t a actual synchronization between Excel and your picture storage system, as a PIM with DAM (Digital Asset Administration) operate would supply
3. Filter by classes.
   This makes it simpler for you and the customer to find merchandise, though chances are you’ll discover looking for them by key phrases or identify is enough.
4. Hyperlink to different spreadsheets.
   Every product will want its datasheet with detailed technical data. For the hyperlink to be utilized, this datasheet will need to have the identical identify because the product.

As soon as your Excel doc is prepared, you should utilize this spreadsheet to:

• Export data to different packages, akin to an e-commerce platform that manages your on-line retailer.
• Save data to be used in catalog design packages, akin to InDesign.
• Instantly obtain the spreadsheet content material as a PDF to share with distributors, retailers, or prospects (though its design gained’t be very spectacular).

Excel templates for product catalogs

Info fields in Excel product catalogs can fluctuate considerably relying on every product kind and may embody extra or fewer variants, subcategories and subfamilies.

The problem with Excel product catalogs

If yours is a bigger firm with a extra bold and complicated catalog, there are some important points when working with Excel.

It’s a must to manually assessment your product data

Spreadsheets can not detect errors or omissions in your product data, nor will they determine which content material requires enchancment or enlargement, as you possibly can with PIM platforms.

You can not handle a considerable amount of information

The bigger the quantity of product information you deal with, the extra fields, rows, columns, tabs, tables, and recordsdata you may want. And ‘extra’ means extra of all the things: extra stress, extra file quantity, extra errors. Apart from one factor – it is no more environment friendly.

With a product catalog in Excel, it’s way more tough to use updates. You’ll want to speculate way more time coming into information, making corrections, and looking for data.

The extra folks you may have concerned in contributing, modifying, and updating product data (designers, product managers, salespeople, entrepreneurs), the higher the danger of making conflicting variations.

You’ll be able to’t join it to different software program programs

Automation can prevent valuable time and assets, however with Excel, you should regularly enter information by hand. You’re unable to hook up with different packages that may pace up product modifications and updates.

When it first appeared on the scene, Excel gave the impression to be the versatile resolution for 1000’s of duties and industries. Nevertheless, in an period of quickly creating applied sciences, it is extremely restricted as a instrument to centralize product catalogs.

Find out how to create higher product catalogs

Excel doesn’t facilitate freedom of modifying or agility of upkeep and improve.

Moderately than making a product catalog with Excel, think about saving effort and time with a system that:

• Automates all processes.
• Lets you schedule content material updates.
• Checks high quality and consistency.
• Synchronizes and centralizes product information throughout all platforms
• Creates easy-to-locate backups and retains a historical past of modifications and variations you can get well.