What’s the Best Database for a Product Catalog?

Learn How to Make an Online Product Catalog

When managing a product catalog, whether for an e-commerce business or a network of physical stores, finding the best product catalog database can make all the difference. With thousands of products, unique pricing and availability per location, hierarchical categories, multiple suppliers, and complex filtering needs, traditional methods like spreadsheets quickly fall short. Businesses need a solution that can efficiently store and retrieve product information while accommodating real-world complexities like discount categories and attribute-based filtering.

This article explores the best databases for a product catalog, comparing options, and provides insights into designing a schema that meets the demands of modern product management. Whether you run an online shop or a network of retail stores, understanding the right database approach for a product catalog can simplify operations and improve customer experience.

Last, choosing the right tool for your database is essential: with Five, an online database builder, you can launch a custom product catalog database in hours. Keep reading to learn how!

Why a Product Catalog Database Matters

A product catalog database is essential for businesses, whether they operate online or offline, as e-commerce or physical, brick-and-mortar retailers, wholesalers or distributors.

It serves as a centralized repository for storing detailed information about products, including descriptions, prices, availability, and attributes like SKU numbers, dimensions, or packaging details. This centralized access to data supports day-to-day operations and ensures consistency across teams.

Internally, departments such as inventory management, marketing, and procurement rely on the database to stay on top of stock levels, manage SKUs, and coordinate pricing strategies. For example, inventory teams can track which items are running low in specific stores, while marketing teams can craft targeted campaigns based on product categories or availability.

For sales representatives and inside sales teams, a well-maintained product catalog database is a critical resource. It allows them to convey accurate and up-to-date information to customers about products, services, pricing, and availability. This facilitates smoother sales processes.

In summary, a robust product catalog database isn’t just a backend tool. It’s a vital component that supports every aspect of a business’s operations, ensuring teams have the insights they need to make informed decisions and serve customers effectively.

Core Functions of a Product Catalog Database

A product catalog database has at least four important functions:

1. Centralized and Accurate Data Management

A product catalog database eliminates the need for multiple spreadsheets or disconnected systems. By housing all product information—SKUs, pricing, specifications, stock levels, and vendor details—in one location, it reduces errors caused by data duplication or inconsistencies. Operations and internal teams benefit from having a single source of truth for all product-related decisions, ensuring accuracy and reliability.

2. Improved Inventory and Supply Chain Coordination

The database provides real-time visibility into stock levels and availability, enabling the team to plan and manage inventory more effectively. For example, it can alert teams to low stock levels or oversupplied items, helping avoid out-of-stock situations or excess inventory. Managers can also use it to streamline communication with suppliers, ensuring timely replenishments and better alignment with demand forecasts.

3. Automate Workflows and Increase Efficiency

A well-structured product catalog database allows for automation of time-consuming tasks, such as generating inventory reports, tracking product changes, or updating pricing across platforms. This frees up operations teams to focus on strategic initiatives rather than routine data maintenance.

4. Support for Scaling and Expansion

As businesses grow and add new products, suppliers, or locations, a product catalog database scales with the organization. It supports complex product hierarchies, regional pricing variations, and multi-store operations. This means that operational processes remain efficient even as the business grows.

What’s the Best Database for a Product Catalog?

When it comes to selecting the best database for a product catalog, there are plenty of options: relational or non-relational, hosted or on-premise, PostgreSQL, MariaDB, MongoDB or MySQL. It’s easy to get lost in a jungle of database options and technical jargon.

Five, a rapid application devleopment environment, is a smart alternative for businesses that need a product catalog database quickly and cost-efficiently.

Here’s why Five is an excellent choice:

✅ Ready-to-use Product Database: Five gives you access to a ready-to-use, fully customizable product database that comes with all the essential features.

✅ Relational MySQL Database: With MySQL at its core, Five allows you to organize your product data in a structured, relational format, making it easy to retrieve and analyze.

✅ Fully Customizable: Tailor your product catalog database to fit your unique business needs, whether it’s managing SKUs, hierarchical categories, or region-specific pricing.

✅ Cost-Effective: Five offers a budget-friendly solution without compromising on features or scalability, making it suitable for businesses of all sizes.

✅ Cloud-Hosted: Access your product catalog securely from anywhere, ensuring data availability and real-time updates across teams.

✅ Ease of Use: Five’s intuitive interface and built-in tools make it accessible to both technical and non-technical users, reducing implementation time and effort.

✅ Seamless Implementation: Launch your database quickly with pre-configured templates and minimal setup requirements.

Preview the Product Catalog Database
Manage Product Data More Efficiently

How to Create a Product Catalog Database in 3 Steps

Let’s map out the steps to create a product catalog database.

Step 1: List Out All Product Attributes

To build your product catalog database, you first want to create a complete list of all product attributes and define your data structure.

Take the list above as an example and think about what matters to your business, your customers and your employees as they are dealing with products. Your database is supposed to be a “single source of truth” about your products, so make sure it is as complete as possible.

A good source of inspiration for defining the right product attributes is listening to your customers: what are the most common questions they ask about your products?

Must-have items in your list are typically:

• Product Name
• Product Description
• Unit Price
• Ingredients or Materials
• Size(s)
• Weight
• Colors
• Category
• Supplier
• Discontinued

Once you have your list of attributes, move on to step 2.

Step 2: Define Choices For Each Attribute

In the second step, wherever possible, define choices for each attribute. This will introduce consistency into your database.

For example, if you are dealing with products that come in different widths, define whether you would like to express width in centimeters, millimeters, or inches. Or, if you require inches for your American customers and centimeters for your European customers, store both in your database, but in separate columns.

Similarly, for colors, it is recommended to define possible choices: green, blue, yellow, etc. If you need to be more granular – dark green, forest green, and olive green – make sure to define these choices as well.

The advantages of defining choices are data consistency, clean data, and avoidance of errors.

With steps 1 and 2 completed, you should now have a table that looks something like this, but with your own product attributes in row 1, and with pre-defined choices in row 2 (to the extent this is applicable).

In Step 3, we will create the product catalog database.

Step 3: Start With a Ready-to-Use Template and Enhance

The quickest way to implement a database for your product catalog is by starting with a prebuilt product catalog application that includes all essential features.

Our product database, for example, lets you:

✅ Create, maintain and edit a product catalog online
✅ Print a product catalog as a PDF file
✅ Maintain and manage stock and inventory levels
✅ Sends out automatic stock warnings so you never run out of inventory.

It is also login-protected, secured through encryption, and can be accessed by multiple users at the same time, from any device.

With your product catalog database in place, it’s now time to enhance. Based on everything you’ve gathered in steps 1 and 2, list out missing fields, features or customizations that make the product catalog truly yours. We usually recommend categorizing your list of enhancements and customizations as essential, nice-to-have and optional:

✅ Essential, must-have features are non-negotiable and must-haves for your business. These include, for example, custom dashboards, email notifications or alerts to improve how data is visualized or flows through your business.
🚦 Optional, should-have features are features that are important but not essential. Their implementation usually comes down to a cost-benefit analysis and ROI. If it significantly improves the application for your business and is easy to implement, the ROI is mostly likely positive.
✖️Optional, could-have features. These features are nice to have, but less significant than “should-have” features.

Describe your essentials in as much detail as possible. A thorough description avoids costly time delays during their implementation.

Equipped with your list of enhancements, you can then go ahead and customize the product catalog database. Best of all, and thanks to Five’s low-code nature, new features can be added quickly and cost-effectively.

Product Catalog Databases: Get Started Today

To implement a custom product catalog database in your business, start by exploring our product database application. Map out your needs that go over and beyond what’s the database includes out of the box, and start implementing new features using Five.

By following the steps mentioned above, you can rapidly create robust and scalable product catalog software tailored to your needs!