Automate your product catalogue: Quable & Easycatalog
13 September 2022
Today we’re introducing a distinguished partner: Axome.
Axome boasts 20 years’ experience in e-commerce and 40 years’ expertise in product catalogues specifically. Three key areas of expertise form part of the brand’s DNA:
- Web and e-commerce: PrestaShop, WordPress, Shopify…
- Marketing and services: Data Publishing, Easycatalog, Quable PIM (hello 👋)...
- Web marketing & social media: lead generation, social media support…
One of Axome’s key strengths is its flexibility and its ability to work equally well with large corporations (Suez, Crédit Agricole, Galeries Lafayette…), whose projects last 9 or 12 months, as well as with smaller companies and start-ups. Axome’s methods are tailored to each type of project.
Here at Quable, we’re very proud to be one of Axome’s partner and tech solution providers within its ecosystem. When it comes to catalogue production, Axome possesses genuine, solid expertise. See for yourself; Axome has been producing catalogues since the 1980s and possesses all the relevant skills required to handle companies’ data and process it automatically.
Why create a catalogue?
- This is certainly a golden opportunity for you reading this on your screen: online advertisers are ‘shunning’ catalogues, so there’s a gap in the market for you – a fully accessible audience that you need to reach as a matter of urgency.
- Create a ‘physical’ experience, thanks to this tangible medium that can truly become part of every household and everyone’s daily life. It’s a medium that fosters a genuine sense of discovery about your brand, and one that holds even greater significance in the B2B sector.
- A more premium perception: the catalogue is, in itself, a more premium item than a simple link to a web page.
What is Easycatalog?
Easycatalog is a plug-in – in other words, a programme that adds extra features to a main software application, in this case InDesign. In fact, we haven’t been 100 per cent honest with you; strictly speaking, Easycatalog doesn’t add any new features to InDesign but uses its native functions by automating them rather than carrying them out manually – a subtle distinction, then.
What are the benefits of automatically laying out your catalogue?
- Reliability of content: you can be certain that all the information is of high quality; there’s no manual data entry and/or copying and pasting – tasks that are time-consuming and often prone to errors.
- Efficiency and time savings: whether you have 500 or 30,000 product references, automated layout allows you to validate this information much more quickly and simplifies the integration of text and images.
- Simplified updates: whether it’s prices or any other information, the centralised data feed allows you to update your materials in just a few clicks.
- Extremely easy translations: customisation, translation, currencies or bespoke pricing… the different versions of your materials are produced in a matter of moments.
This automation is ideal for various types of material. Naturally, typical uses include catalogues, but also directories, price lists, diaries, brochures and, finally, product sheets, labels, guides and any other material requiring customisation.
Quable’s role in Easycatalog
The Quable/Easycatalog integration comes into its own within each system’s ecosystem. To operate effectively, Easycatalog requires a data source, and this is precisely where we come in. Quable (or Excel files, or an ERP system) supplies the data to Easycatalog, having first processed this data stream.
Put simply, in order to automate the creation of your catalogue as quickly and efficiently as possible, Easycatalog needs data – but structured data – which is why Quable’s PIM plays such a vital and relevant role upstream. If the data already comes from Quable, this will subsequently mean much less work for Easycatalog (no need to compile or restructure the data), meaning your catalogue can be produced much more quickly.
Conclusion
In short, choosing to automate your catalogue rather than using a so-called ‘traditional’ approach offers numerous benefits that will make all the difference: a real time saving, 90 per cent fewer content errors, an average saving of 40 per cent from the third year onwards, and a 70 per cent increase in productivity. Of course, the success of this project is only possible if the data has been prepared effectively in advance: gathering the data, checking its integrity and completeness… all of which is possible thanks to Quable.