As noted in a previous post, the subscription e-commerce business is booming. This segment has grown by more than 100% per year over the past five years, according to McKinsey, and research from Shopify suggests that global e-commerce sales will hit $4.8T by 2021. Capturing and managing your e-commerce offerings in a product catalog provides an organized approach to support this growth.

What is a catalog? In this context, it’s a list of everything you offer for sale to customers, along with detailed information about each offering, like description and price. Because your offerings can be physical, digital, or service-oriented, Recurly refers to these offerings as "items." If you sell the same items or combinations of items to many different customers, organizing them in a catalog provides a number of benefits. You can manage those items easily within a single interface, and when the same item is sold to multiple customers or across multiple sales channels, a catalog makes it much easier to track and analyze those sales.

To better support this practice, Recurly is launching a new catalog functionality. Recurly’s Item Catalog feature lets you either build your catalog of offerings in Recurly or easily integrate Recurly with your e-commerce platform of choice.  You can see it in action here. 

Recurly research shows e-commerce segments draw up to 15% of their TPV from one-time charges, making this a strong option for expanding your business. As such, the item catalog feature also enables you to sell the items in your catalog as one-time charges in Recurly, and easily track historic and scheduled item sales.

In the next release, the feature will be expanded to support sales of catalog items within plans and subscriptions as well. Our goal is to provide the flexibility to align the way you sell your offerings in Recurly with the way you do business outside of Recurly.For more information about our catalog functionality, please see our detailed catalog documentation or connect with Recurly Support.Â