A catalogue that produces no enquiries is usually not a pricing problem. It is a discovery problem — and on GeM, discovery is mechanical.

Buyers find products by filtering on structured attributes. If your attributes are incomplete or wrong, your product does not appear in the filtered list at all. It does not appear lower down; it is simply absent. Price is irrelevant to a buyer who never sees you.

Attributes are the product, as far as the portal is concerned

This is the mental shift that fixes most catalogues.

Marketplace instincts from Amazon or your own website do not transfer. There, a persuasive title and good photography drive discovery. On GeM, the buyer typically starts from a category, applies filters for the specifications they need, and looks at what survives.

So the question is never “does my listing describe the product well?” It is “will my listing survive the filters a buyer will apply?”

Everything below follows from that.

Golden parameters and mandatory attributes

Each category defines a set of attributes. Some are mandatory. Some — often called golden parameters — are the ones buyers actually filter on and which carry disproportionate weight in whether you are found.

The discipline:

  1. Fill every mandatory attribute. Not “N/A”, not a dash. A blank or junk value is a filter you fail.
  2. Fill the golden parameters accurately, in the units the category expects.
  3. Match the category’s vocabulary, not your internal product language. If the category expresses a dimension in millimetres, give millimetres.

That last point causes more invisible failures than any other. Your catalogue says “1.2 m”; the category filters on millimetres; a buyer filtering 1000–1500 mm never sees you.

Look at how comparable listings present the same thing

Before you upload a family of products, spend twenty minutes studying comparable live listings in the same category.

You are looking for the conventions: how the leading listings express the specification, which optional attributes they bother to complete, how they describe variants. Where your instinct differs from the category convention, the convention usually wins — because it reflects how buyers in that category actually search.

This is the one place where copying the room is the right strategy. Consistency with buyer expectation beats differentiation. Save your differentiation for price, delivery and service, where a buyer can actually act on it.

Specifications, images and datasheets

Three supporting elements decide whether a listing survives scrutiny once it is found:

  • Technical specification sheets aligned to the category’s template, so the evaluator can tick you off quickly rather than hunting for a number.
  • Images that meet the compliance requirements — correct product, adequate resolution, no third-party branding or watermarks that do not belong to you. Outdated images are a routine cause of buyer verification failures.
  • Datasheets that agree with the attributes you entered. A datasheet contradicting your specification field is worse than no datasheet.

Bulk upload without bulk errors

For anything beyond a handful of SKUs, bulk upload is the sane route. It is also an efficient way to replicate one mistake across two hundred products.

A workable process:

  1. Upload one product manually first. Get it accepted. That listing becomes your reference for what the category actually wants.
  2. Build the bulk sheet from that reference, not from your internal product master.
  3. Validate a small batch — ten or twenty rows — before running the full file.
  4. Spot-check the live listings after upload, filtering as a buyer would rather than viewing your own catalogue page.

That fourth step is the one people skip, and it is the only one that tells you whether the upload worked in the sense that matters.

Variants: separate listings or one?

Where a buyer would filter on the difference, it should be a distinct listing with its own attributes. Where the difference is genuinely cosmetic, one listing avoids splitting your own visibility.

The failure mode is collapsing meaningfully different products into one listing “to save time”. The listing then carries attributes true of only one variant, and it either fails verification or misleads a buyer — which becomes an incident after delivery.

Listings decay, quietly

This is the part sellers most consistently neglect. A catalogue is not a one-time project.

Specifications get superseded. Prices drift away from the market. Category attribute sets change, and a listing that was complete last year can be incomplete now. None of this generates an alert. Your catalogue just gradually stops producing enquiries, and nobody can say when it started.

Set a quarterly refresh and treat it as maintenance, not as optional improvement:

  • Reconcile prices against current comparable listings.
  • Re-check mandatory and golden attributes against the current category definition.
  • Replace images that no longer represent what you ship.
  • Retire products you can no longer supply — a live listing you cannot fulfil is an incident waiting to be raised.

Diagnosing a catalogue that produces nothing

Work in this order:

  1. Can you find your own product by filtering as a buyer would? If not, the problem is attributes, and nothing else matters yet.
  2. If you can be found, are you priced within the visible band? If not, the problem is price.
  3. If found and competitively priced but still no enquiries, look at presentation — images, datasheets, specification clarity.

Most sellers assume they are at step two. Most are actually at step one.

Getting it done

Catalogue work is unglamorous and it is where a large share of GeM revenue is decided. If you would rather have it built properly the first time — attribute mapping, specification sheets, compliance checks and a refresh cycle — that is our catalogue creation and product upload service.

The first consultation is free, and we will tell you which of the three diagnostic steps above your catalogue is actually stuck on.