Your profession inevitably shapes how you see the world. There is a saying that if all you have is a hammer, everything looks like a nail. When you design e-commerce systems for a living, something similar happens: everywhere you look, you see products.
That perspective becomes especially useful when omnichannel and digital commerce enter industries that have not traditionally thought of themselves as “selling online.”
At first glance, these don’t look like e-commerce at all. But from a digital commerce perspective, they’re all products.
Businesses sell goods and services online in many forms. Some products are simple and ready to buy. Others require configuration before purchase. Some are paid for at checkout, others through subscriptions or usage-based pricing. Products can be physical or digital, shipped or streamed, owned or accessed as a service.
From an e-commerce systems perspective, the differences matter less than the structure.When everything you offer is modeled as a product, complexity becomes manageable. And that is where a generic, flexible product catalog becomes a strategic advantage—especially during digital transformation.
At the core of every omnichannel commerce system sits a catalog. A catalog is more than a list of items. It is a structured collection of products that can be searched, browsed, filtered, compared, and recommended. Products have descriptions, images, specifications, pricing, availability, and relationships to other products. They appear in search results, on category pages, and in personalized recommendations. By modeling whatever your business offers as products, you unlock all of this functionality by default.
Take the public sector as an example. Governments at every level provide a wide range of services, yet their websites often struggle with usability and discoverability. You know a service exists, but finding it can be frustrating.
Some services cost money—business permits or parking access. Others are free, like school registrations. Some even involve payments to citizens, such as social assistance. When these services are modeled as products, they can be consistently presented, categorized, and surfaced through search.
Product attributes enable advanced search, faceted navigation, and SEO and GEO-friendly structures that help users—and search engines—find exactly what they need. Instead of hunting through pages, citizens land directly on the relevant service.
The same logic applies to rental companies. Each apartment becomes a product in the catalog, complete with images, location data, availability dates, and pricing. Customers can search, compare, and apply using the same familiar e-commerce patterns.
When everything is a product, bundling becomes straightforward. Many industries rely on selling multiple services or offerings in a single transaction. In the public sector, citizens might register children for several activities at once, add them to a cart, and pay in one flow.
Telecommunications companies are masters of bundling: mobile plans, devices, accessories, broadband, TV subscriptions, and leased equipment—all combined into a single offer. Delivering a seamless experience across such variety requires a unified, generic product catalog. Airlines bundle flights, accommodation, insurance, digital travel guides, and physical goods. Manufacturing companies increasingly sell connected devices paired with cloud services and software subscriptions. IoT turns hardware into hybrid product ecosystems.
None of this works at scale without a consistent way to model physical products, digital services, and subscriptions together.
No business knows exactly how its offerings will evolve. You may acquire another company, form new partnerships, expand into new markets, or rethink your business model entirely. Change is constant—and increasingly fast.
Insurance companies, for example, are shifting from selling policies to reducing risk. That shift expands their catalog dramatically: insurance products sit alongside smart devices, monitoring services, and preventive solutions. Manufacturers evolve into software providers. Physical products become platforms.
Customers should not feel this internal complexity. Their experience should remain coherent, intuitive, and familiar—regardless of how your business evolves behind the scenes.A generic, product-centric catalog makes that possible. It allows businesses to reuse existing e-commerce infrastructure, apply best practices consistently, and scale without rebuilding foundations every time offerings change.
As digital commerce expands beyond traditional retail, the definition of a product continues to broaden. Services, subscriptions, access rights, physical goods, and digital experiences all need to coexist within the same systems and customer journeys.
The businesses that scale successfully are the ones that embrace a product-first model early. By treating everything they offer as a product, they gain structure, consistency, and flexibility across channels and markets.
A unified product catalog improves discoverability, enables seamless bundling, and allows new offerings to be introduced without disrupting the customer experience. It turns e-commerce infrastructure into a long-term asset rather than a limitation.
In the end, e-commerce success does not depend on what you sell—but on how well your systems are structured to support whatever comes next.