How to create an on-line catalog?

On the internet customers are left on their own, there is no salesperson or manager who would tell them about the goods or services. Customers cannot take goods and study them carefully. But how then do they make decisions? There are only two answers:

A) the customer is already acquainted with the product, he/she likes it and wants to buy it.
B) customer liked the information about the product and decided to buy it.

We will consider the second option when a customer chooses some product only by the description given on the site. Therefore, the product description should show a product to the best advantage and point to those features to which the customer pays attention when visiting an ordinary shop. When browsing through the websites, the customer sees pictures of goods and reads the descriptions; we can call the totality of this information a “product card”.

So, in the first stage, you need to make a typical product card.

Stage 1. Making product card

Product name
Product Description
Composition/Characteristics
Color
Size
Price
Price with VAT
Sale price
Picture(s)

You may exclude those points which are inappropriate for you and add some additional ones. You should pay special attention to pictures of a product. If you are selling clothes, you know that the appearance of customers is much more important than any other characteristic. That is why the first thing which customers should see is pictures of products. If your website is selling CDs and/or DVDs, there should be such positions in the product card as:

• mp3 (so that customer could listen to an example);
• Rating
• Format

We would like to draw attention to the fact that any product should have two characteristics for sure; these are product name and price. All the rest of the characteristics depend on the industry.

The product can belong to some certain category of an online catalog. That is why it is important to develop such a catalog structure that can be easily understood by users.

Stage 2. Making up an online catalog

Any catalog consists of sections. You can use the structure of some already existing catalogs or make up a new one. It is worth making up (developing) a new catalog if you want to:

• sell not all the goods, but only some parts of them.
• sell goods at a special price.
• hold sales and auctions.

You can include special categories such as “$20 – $50”, and “$50 – $200” sub-categories in SWIM category.

Stage 3. Links between categories/products

In case you want to offer customers additional products, you need to create links between products based on some principle. For example, the “swimsuits” category can be linked to the “beach bags” category. The next stage is the development of online catalog shopping, but this will be the topic of our next article.

Thus, here is the list of documents you need to develop or give to the web developers:

1. Example of current catalog of products
2. Example of the product description(s)
3. Product card(s)
4. On-line catalog(s)
5. List of attendant products (or categories)

Having this information, web developers will be able to develop not only catalog design but also e-shop.