As a furniture retailer, your product catalog is one of the most important aspects of your business. Your product selection is likely to be ever-changing, which makes keeping your online catalog up to date, reflective of your in-store offering, and enhanced with relevant product data a time-consuming endeavor — unless you have the right tools.
In this blog article, we’ll cover the importance and benefits of updated vendor catalogs as well as Blueport’s furniture ecommerce solutions for furniture retailers.
The Importance of Integrated Vendor Catalogs for Furniture Retailers
Ecommerce sales have increased by nearly 10% from 2023-2024, and they don’t seem to be slowing down any time soon. In fact, at the end of 2023 alone, ecommerce alone drove 15.6% of sales for businesses.
To capitalize on this growth, furniture retailers must have the most reliable and effective ecommerce solution, including an efficient way to manage product catalogs.
What Robust Vendor Catalogs Can Do for You
Having the right tool set to create, enhance, and update your catalog can reduce the time spent managing its data and images. In addition to an easy-to-use PIM tool, leveraging data directly from your vendors can reduce the time spent populating product data and adding photography.
Integrating comprehensive and updated vendor catalogs can provide a streamlined way to populate important product data such as descriptions, dimensions, colors, and materials, as well as images, including room photography and swatch images, all of which are critical for enhancing your customers’ shopping discovery experience.
Robust vendor catalogs also:
- Allow retailers to offer an expanded selection of their in-store offerings to their customers without the need to maintain a large inventory themselves - such as showing products in more colors or sizes
- Include new and trending products, allowing retailers to quickly adapt to changing consumer preferences and market demand based on online shopping behavior
- Provide direct data from the vendor enabling consistently accurate and relevant product data, reducing errors from manually curated data entry
Exceeding Retailer Expectations With Blueport’s Vendor Catalog Solution
Built in partnership with Salsify, a leading PIM System, Blueport’s best-in-class solution for vendor catalogs not only provides access to accurate, updated, and robust product data, it enables you to customize the data with your own images, descriptions, and pricing. Our solution enables retailers to quickly and easily add their selection of furniture to their website.
Additional features of our vendor catalog solution include:
Real-time Updates: Import product information from vendors on demand, ensuring your website always displays the latest data.
Data Enrichment: Enhance product listings with rich media, detailed descriptions, and other relevant information to improve the customer shopping experience.
Flexible Editing: Keep all, some, or none of the vendor data for your website. Using Bleuport’s PIM tool, Salsify, ecommerce teams can decide which vendor data to keep and which to discard before publishing products on their site.
How It Works
Blueport’s vendor catalogs provide furniture retailers with access to a comprehensive database of product data. This centralized repository simplifies the process of managing and updating product information, and helps streamline the catalog data creation and editing process.
On the Blueport Platform, retailers integrate their existing ERP system’s SKUs with Blueport’s vendor database, allowing them to import product data into the PIM for detailed review and editing. Once finalized, they can publish the updated information directly onto their website. Furthermore, Blueport’s vendor catalogs include the option to use vendor-provided images, personalize, and streamline your catalog.
Optimize Your Online and Offline Sales With Blueport
Integrating vendor catalogs into your furniture retail website is more than just a technical upgrade — it's a strategic move that can drive your business forward. With advanced solutions like Blueport, you can ensure that your product information is accurate and enhanced with compelling and helpful product data, giving you a competitive edge in the fast-paced furniture ecommerce market.
To learn more about Blueport’s ecommerce platform for furniture retailers, contact us today and we’ll work together to personalize our offerings and meet your exact needs.
