Product catalog templates can act as an internal database for storing and organizing all of your product information, including prices, suppliers, variants, and descriptions. Or you can use them to showcase your products to potential customers.
No matter how many items you’re selling and whether they’re physical or digital products, this curated list of templates has something for everyone.
Knack: A customizable product catalog database for displaying products online
Knack is a no-code application builder that shines for its asset management and online database capabilities — two things that are crucial for product catalogs.
With Knack, you can manage your entire catalog with a fully customizable database on the backend. From there, you can embed it on your website or mobile app for customers to look through on their own.
It can also work well as an internal database, but it truly shines for showcasing your offers.
If you have an existing website but aren’t able to sell products or add ecommerce functionality, you can embed your product catalog instead of switching and rebuilding your website somewhere else.
As a no-code builder, it’s much easier than writing custom code and faster than starting over from scratch.
You’ll be able to control every aspect of your database and set up admin accounts so your team can add or update products as needed.
This template makes it easy to group products into categories, add details related to size and color, and add as many products as you’d like with no limitations.
You can also add images, other variations, customization options, and more.
But what makes this template (and Knack) better than the rest for embedding your products is that you can easily integrate it with PayPal or Stripe. If you want to learn more about the differences between the two, check out our guide on the best ecommerce payment solutions.
Once that’s set up, users will be able to browse your database and buy whatever they’d like in a few clicks.
Despite Knack’s drag-and-drop no-code nature, it still requires technical expertise and time to set up. You’ll also need to maintain it on your own.
Knack offers a 14-day trial so you can see if it’s right for you before investing.
Notion: A simple product catalog template to organize your data
Notion is an incredibly flexible productivity platform with collaborative docs, relational databases, tables, and lightweight project management features. It’s a great way for individuals and small teams to stay organized and centralize everything in one place.
It’s a bit of a blank slate when you first sign up — rather than being ready to use out of the box, you can transform your workspace into whatever you need.
Thankfully, templates make it easier to get started. My favorite product catalog template is simple and streamlined for internal use.
More on Notion: Notion Review | Notion vs Asana | Notion vs Todoist.
The creator of this template has been using Notion for over five years and has a team of 30+ people working for the three digital brands he’s built. As such, it’s been tweaked and improved over time.
His real-world experience with Notion has also clearly been applied to this template. There’s also a free video you can watch to see how it works.
At its core, it’s a simple and straightforward database for your products. You can keep track of every detail you care about with its built-in table and gallery views. Out of the box, you’ll be able to categorize them by type, give each product a status, set variants, add pricing information, and upload images.
You can also add your own custom fields or edit the existing fields to keep track of whatever you need to.
If you use Notion for other elements of your business, the simplicity of this template makes it easy to integrate it into your existing set up.
The template is technically listed as free, but it’s locked behind a “name a fair price” paywall that starts at $2. There are also various add-ons you can buy, including a product development template, a full suite of templates for product and commerce teams, and access to all product templates from the creator.
Airtable: An advanced product catalog database
Airtable is one of the most flexible relational database solutions. I’ve used it for years to manage nearly every aspect of my business — it’s powerful, customizable, and capable of streamlining processes and workflows across your entire company.
The free plan supports up to 1,000 records and five users. From there, you can scale as much as you need — regardless of how much your catalog expands, you’ll never outgrow Airtable.
More on Airtable: Airtable Review | Airtable vs Asana | Airtable vs Trello.
As one of the most scalable options on my list, Airtable works really well for large product catalogs. If you have a handful of products, it’s probably not worth the hassle of learning how to use it — because of its flexibility and infinite scalability, it has a steep learning curve.
But the reason it’s hard to learn is what makes it so powerful.
You can build custom applications and trackers, build on top of existing templates or bases, and ultimately centralize everything in one place if you’re willing to put in the time.
This template makes it easy to get started building and managing your product catalog. It has built in list and gallery views with dozens of other options you can add in a few clicks. You can sort, group, filter, and view everything however it makes sense for you.
There are custom fields for tags, materials, dimensions, price, color, units sold, gross sales, and more.
Beyond adding and managing products, this template also lets you keep track of vendor details, clients, orders, line items, and contacts too.
Once you’ve made your own copy of the template, it includes a range of sample data to show you how it works. You can overwrite or delete the data whenever you’re ready to add your own products.
Stackby: A product catalog template with free API access
Stackby is a no-code database builder, similar to Airtable. Stackby is more affordable and on the simpler side, but it offers similar flexibility in terms of managing multiple elements of your business in one place. One of the best things about Stackby is that you can use its API connectors on every plan, including the free one.
This is great if you want to sync inventory and order data from Shopify or your CRM rather than importing and exporting or entering them manually.
My favorite product catalog template for Stackby comes with tables for products, clients, orders, vendors, and line items. It’s not quite as complex as the one for Airtable, which may be a good thing if you want to keep it a bit simpler.
It’s easy to add new products — each one has its own type, image, price, inventory status, color, vendor, size, stock, and description.
The template is also set up to track units sold and gross sales too.
However, you can easily add additional fields, calculations, and formulas to keep track of any details you’d like. For example, you could have a field for total inventory and create a calculation that subtracts units sold to give you your current inventory.
As I mentioned earlier, you can sync this with your ecommerce store, CRM, ERP, or any other data source using Stackby’s APIs.
One thing that seems to be lacking in this template is the ability to seamlessly handle variants. It’s not impossible, but you’ll have to do some thinking and tweaking to make it work.
Trello: A Kanban style product catalog template
Trello is one of the best options for Kanban project management. It’s impossible to overcomplicate, it’s simple and familiar, and it takes just a few minutes to set up. It really is a breath of fresh air if you just want something straightforward and easy to use.
Its free plan is incredible and you can likely stay on it for quite some time. You can create unlimited cards on up to ten boards with unlimited file storage and unlimited users.
Despite Trello’s simplicity, I used it to manage high-volume content production for years before switching to something else. Don’t let its approachable nature fool you — it’s just as capable as the others, especially for managing your product catalog.
More on Trello: Trello Review | Trello vs Pipedrive | Trello vs Wrike.
While this template can work well for any type of product, it works particularly well for digital assets, like white papers, case studies, webinars, worksheets, and other downloadable materials.
Rather than using the columns to track statuses, you can set them up to organize your products by type. Each card is a product that contains all the information you need to keep track of.
You can add images, links, descriptions, updates, and anything else you care about.
If you’re a visual person, you can set images as cover photos to give each card a visual representation of what the product is. This makes it nicer to look at and easy to spot what you’re looking for.
Because you get unlimited file storage (even on the free plan), you never have to worry about running out of space.
Product catalog templates for Excel and Word
If your products don’t change often and you want to keep things clean, you can use a spreadsheet to keep track of your catalog too. This works great if you don’t have very many products, need something you can use right away, or don’t care about connecting your catalog to the rest of your business.
Standard documents organized in folders can even work well if you have a long sales cycle or need to share a brochure with potential customers.
Template 1: A basic spreadsheet to organize your products
Knack has a library of free templates you can download and use with Excel or Google Sheets. One of them is a simple product catalog you can use to stay organized.
Although it’s simple, you don’t have to worry about complex setup, integrations, collaboration, or anything like that. You can simply start adding your products, including relevant information as needed.
For each product, you’ll be able to add its name, a shorter name, a description, pricing information, and any other columns you’d like to add.
Even though it’s simple, you can easily customize it to make it work for you.
You can add owners, comment on different products, manage variations, add additional sheets, set up filters and chips, and make it more advanced if you want to. There’s also nothing stopping you from recreating any of the templates above in spreadsheet form.
They have a rap for being simple, but spreadsheets can be incredibly powerful if you know how to use them.
Template 2: Visual product catalog templates for showcasing your products
Looking for an easy way to create visually appealing one pagers or documents for your products? This collection of 50 Word document templates from TemplateLab is a great place to start. The entire set is free, letting you pick and choose which ones work well for your brand and industry.
Whether you want to print out physical one-pagers or you’re emailing them to potential clients, this collection has something for everyone.
Some templates focus on a single product while others make it easy to showcase an entire line, products that go well together, top sellers, or any other grouping you’d like. They’re easy to edit so you can create multiple variations and have them ready whenever you need them.
Word makes it easy to adjust global settings like fonts and colors so you can easily make these match your brand.
You can also customize them as much as you want to.
Choosing the right product catalog template
Most product catalog templates are simple and easy to customize, so it’s relatively easy to adjust any of them to match your needs.
For most, the more important question is which tool you should use. If you already have a project management solution like monday.com, ClickUp, or Smartsheet, you can use that to create a simple product catalog manager.
The templates included in this post can be good for inspiration while you set up your own.
If you don’t have a way to track projects and tasks but you need one, I suggest zooming out and deciding which project management solution will work best for your situation.
For advanced users and complex businesses, relational database software is more flexible, powerful, and customizable. It’s often used in place of project management software for those who are willing to build their own systems.
Either way, you can set everything up and implement your product catalog as an integrated part of your business operating system.
Just need something fast and simple? Spreadsheets work just fine.
Here are some other considerations to keep in mind.
Internal vs customer-facing
It’s important to understand whether you’re looking for a way to keep track of all your products or showcase them to potential customers.
For internal use, collaboration and ease of use are key factors to consider. If you work with a team, it should be easy for them to access and edit as needed without learning anything complex.
Showcasing products externally requires a bit more thought as the way you decide to do it can impact how potential customers perceive your brand.
It’s important to create visually appealing documents that are easy to read and understand for someone who’s not familiar with your business. This can take a lot of trial and error to get right, but is worth it if you rely on these one pagers to do a lot of the talking.
Number of products
For small catalogs, it really doesn’t matter what you use. All that matters is that you end up with a simple way to keep track of everything and centralize all the details.
As your catalog gets bigger, you’ll likely need a way to categorize, filter, and sort your products so you can easily find what you’re looking for. Relational database tools and project management software often include features you’ll find handy if you’re managing more than a few dozen products with a team of other people.
Types of products
Simple product catalogs don’t have a lot of variants. These are easy to keep track of and any template will work just fine.
Things start to get more complex as you add additional variations like color, design, style, size, or customizations. If this sounds like your catalog, taking the time to learn and build a custom database is likely a better choice as it will make managing all of these details as easy as possible.
Data syncing and APIs
If you plan to manually add and manage all of your products, you can skip this section. Otherwise, it’s important to think about how you’re going to get everything into your template.
You can import them or sync multiple data sources together using integrations or APIs.
Keeping track of inventory levels, purchases, and line items, for example, is probably not something you want to keep track of manually unless you’re dealing with a low volume. As your sales scale, keeping up will become impossible.
That’s where syncing with your online store, payment processor, or CRM comes in handy. Some tools have better APIs and integrations than others.
I suggest testing this out during a free trial or asking them about it directly before making any decisions.
How to create your own product catalog template
You can use a spreadsheet, project management solution, productivity platform, or relational database tool to create your own template if you prefer.
In most cases, the process is simple and straightforward. It shouldn’t take too long, either.
At a minimum, I recommend creating columns or fields for:
- Name.
- Description.
- Images.
- ID number.
- Retail price.
- Wholesale price.
- Cost (your cost).
- Link to the product page.
- Variants (colors, sizes, etc.).
As you get things set up, think about what you need to know about each product. It likely won’t be perfect on the first attempt, but it’s important to start using it as soon as possible.
From there, you’ll have a better understanding of what works, what you need to change, and what details are irrelevant or missing. Because you built it yourself, you’ll have no problem adjusting it whenever you need to.
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