How many different items do you sell? Asked of an SME leader, the question usually triggers a silence and then an approximation. "A few hundred", "between one and two thousand", "a lot, I couldn't say precisely". This imprecision is revealing. The product catalog, which should be the exact reflection of what the company offers to the market, is in practice poorly known by its own management. This lack of knowledge is not anecdotal. It reflects a deficit of strategic management on one of the company's most structuring assets.
The catalog as a statement of intent
- A company's catalog is not a simple list of references
- It is a statement of intent sent to the market
- Each product present tells a potential customer what the company knows how to do and wants to sell
- Each product absent tells, conversely, the accepted limits of the offering
- Each product family, through its depth and consistency, tells a positioning story
This strategic dimension of the catalog is often forgotten. Catalogs grow by sedimentation:
- a customer request leads to creating a new product, an innovation leads to adding a reference, a partnership leads to integrating a range.
- After a few years, the catalog has become a heap of products with no overall logic.
- Some references have not sold for a long time but are still there.
- Others were created twice under different names.
- Still others are missing although they would logically complete the range.
This slow degradation is invisible in the short term and costly in the long term. It complicates commercial decision-making (what to focus on), it weighs down operational management (each reference has an administrative cost), and it blurs customers' perception of the company (the offering no longer appears structured).
Regular catalog cleanup, a management discipline
High-performing companies practice what could be called regular catalog cleanup. Once or twice a year, the sales and marketing departments meet to review all active products. For each one, three questions: does it sell enough, is it profitable, is it consistent with our positioning.
Products that have not sold for twelve months are candidates for removal. Unprofitable products must be repriced or withdrawn. Products outside the positioning must be discussed strategically. This discipline, which seems obvious, is in fact rarely practiced. Most SMEs keep indefinitely references that no longer contribute to their success.
In Odoo, archiving a product preserves the history without disturbing current use. An archived product remains viewable for historical analyses, possible returns, warranty renewals, but no longer appears in current lists. This mechanism allows risk-free cleanup, which removes the classic objection "you never know, let's keep it just in case".
Structuring by variants, a simplification lever
A feature of the Odoo catalog that transforms practice is attribute-based variant management. Instead of creating fifty distinct references for fifty combinations of size and color of the same garment model, you create a template product with two attributes (size and color), and the tool generates the variants automatically.
This structuring considerably simplifies catalog maintenance. A change to the template product's description propagates to all its variants. Adding a new color only requires entering the attribute, not creating a new record. Inventory and price management can be done at the template level or for each variant as needed.
For companies that sell products with variants (clothing, paints, modular equipment, services with options), this structuring is one of the most tangible benefits of moving to Odoo.
Product analytics as a decision aid
Once the catalog is structured, analyses become possible. What is the average margin per product family? Which products have the best turnover? Which products sit idle in warehouses? Which products are systematically cross-sold with which others? Which products sell particularly well in certain regions? Which products are seeing demand grow and which are seeing it decline?
These analyses, produced as standard by Odoo's reporting modules, feed strategic decisions. They guide investments (where to put marketing resources), supplier negotiations (which products to negotiate on), and range evolution choices (which products to drop, which to develop).
For SMEs and mid-sized companies that want to move from empirical catalog management to strategic management, these analytical tools are available at no additional cost. The catalog still needs to be structured enough for the analyses produced to be relevant.
The omnichannel challenge
For companies that sell in physical stores, on their online shop, through a network of distributors, and possibly on marketplaces, a single catalog becomes critical. Each channel must see the same products, with the same information, under different conditions according to the defined commercial policies.
The absence of a unified catalog leads to discrepancies:
- a product displayed in store is not on the website, a store price differs from the online price, a promotion launched on one channel is not replicated on the others.
- These discrepancies confuse customers and needlessly complicate teams' lives.
In Odoo, the catalog is unique by definition. Channel variations are done through configuration: this product is available on channel A and channel B but not on channel C, with these differentiated conditions. This unified management is one of the foundations of omnichannel consistency.
A strategic responsibility
The product catalog deserves to be treated as a strategic asset, with an identified owner, quality indicators, and regular governance. For French SMEs and mid-sized companies that want to professionalize their product management, it is one of the most structuring workstreams.
ANOR supports this structuring by combining commercial analysis, Odoo configuration and change management with product teams.