How to use your Product Catalog

Learn more about best practices for managing your product catalog, watch the video below:

The Product Catalog tab within Brand Settings allows you to manage your product catalog information on-demand. From the Product Catalog tab, you can create and map products and identify potential missing or duplicated information that may cause errors in your data.

In addition to the Product Catalog, Tradeswell has also introduced two additional pieces of functionality to help manage and maintain your catalog:

1. Product Catalog Automation - an hourly service to automatically generate your catalog, map products, and add new products based on incoming retail, marketing, and operations data for your brand; and,

2. Group Tags and Group Type Management - a page within the Product Catalog where you can manage group tags and categorize them in a larger group type hierarchy thereby unlocking an additional layer of categorization and presentation of your product catalog.

The Product Catalog can be accessed in your Brand Settings by clicking the wheel icon in the upper right-hand corner and then by clicking on the Product Catalog tab.

With a self-serve product catalog, you can maintain an up-to-date, accurate, and customized view of your e-commerce data. For more information on how to manage your product catalog, please review the topics and frequently asked questions below.

What you can do in your Product Catalog

The Product Catalog gives you access to a list of all of your products in a new Product Catalog table. You can view and edit your products and see how they are mapped across channels. From the table, you can:

• Create and edit your products and channel products

• Add new products before a product launch so data is captured and mapped appropriately

• Edit product information such as SKU, UPC/GTIN, group tags, and default name

• Bulk update product information like applying group tags across multiple products

• Edit channel product information such as channel name, landed cost (for retail channels), channel product ID, and channel parent product ID

• Move channel products to different products or combine multiple products within your catalog in case they are mistakenly mapped

• Search products by ASIN, product name, and SKU

• Filter products by channel or group

Best practices for managing your Product Catalog

Manage product SKUs

Product SKUs will be automatically pulled in as data becomes available. However, one requirement of the Product Catalog is that a SKU can only be associated to a single product within the scope of a Channel integration. Thus, if product listings are remapped, manual intervention will be required to point the SKU towards the new product listing.

Keep your Landed Costs up-to-date for accurate reporting

Within the Product Catalog, you will see pink text with the sub-label of “Average” to show when an estimated landed cost is being used to surface the average landed cost across channels. You can click on the pink average landed cost at the product level to expose the specific landed costs by channel and edit as needed to add your actual landed cost.

Note: If you would like to update your estimated landed cost percentage, you can reset your estimated cost percentage in your Brand tab in Brand Settings.

Group products with customizable tags to maximize platform analytics capabilities

Tagging your products with groups can unlock new layers in which to analyze your data. You can use groups in whatever way makes sense for your company to add an additional level of analysis. Below are some examples of how groups can be applied for maximum results:

• Apply tags for Attributes and Categories
• As you introduce products, you may want to track different attributes of a product in order to compare these products over time. For example, our demo company Hot Takes makes hot sauce and wants to introduce tags for products to map their heat level - low, medium, hot, and on-fire(!). To do this, they would create a tag for each level of spiciness with the group type of “Heat.” Over time, they’ll be able to track what level of spice their shoppers prefer as they think about new products to bring to market.
• Apply tags for Product-Owners
• Some members of your team may be responsible for specific products. If you’d like to track the performance of the products you manage, you can add a tag for each manager of a line within your products. If you'd like to compare assortment lines, you can add a group type for "Team" and assign all those groups to the Team type to see each the performance of each manager's assortment.
• Apply tags for new product launches
• When you launch new products, you may want to add tags to be able to easily track how these not products are performing post-launch. Applying a tag like “new” or “launch” will allow you to easily filter to that group of products.

Group type (or category) and group tag management can be found within the Product Catalog by clicking the “Manage Groups” button on the Product Catalog page.

On the Manage Groups page, you can add groups and assign groups to group types as well as create a hierarchy of your group types that impacts your product list view within product searches in the UI. This provides an additional way to customize your platform - most explicitly seen on your Retail > Product Details dashboard.

Update your product titles for ease of use

Product titles will be added to automatically created products during Product Catalog Automation. The products will be created with human-readable names if that information is available, otherwise, you will see “Automated_” as part of the product name until it is mapped correctly.

We suggest updating any default product names to human-readable names that make sense for your business and team. This will make navigating your Tradeswell account and identifying products easier for all.

You will also want to actively monitor and map any "Automated_" products to existing products where relevant.

To learn more about best practices for managing your product catalog, watch the video above.

Frequently Asked Questions

1. Can I edit the information if there is an issue in my catalog?
   Yes. Any team member with appropriate permissions can edit product or channel product information by clicking to edit your product with the pencil icon to the right of the product name. Only the Company Partner ID cannot be edited as that is automatically populated from the channel integration.

2. Can I re-assign partner products within my catalog?
   Yes. You can re-assign or re-map a partner product within your product catalog by clicking edit a product and selecting the checkbox next to a partner product or products. Then, click the “Select product” drop-down at the bottom of the Partner Product table to move that partner product to a new product.

3. What is the difference between black and pink landed costs?
   Any landed cost in black at the product or partner product level s an actual landed cost entered by a member of your brand. Any landed cost in pink is a landed cost average or a retail partner channel landed cost that is using an estimate based on your indicated percentage in your Brand Settings.

4. Why am I seeing “$0.00” as an estimated landed cost?
   If the cost is pink, it is because there is no finance sales data on which to apply the estimated percentage.
   If the cost is black, this means a “user” either manually via the UI or through the PIM loader has set this cost as zero dollars. We currently accept zero dollars as an acceptable input for product catalog landed cost to account for digital products like gift cards.

If you have any additional questions about your Product Catalog, please contact support@tradeswell.com.