How to create or design a online product catalog.

A catalog, like a logo or business card, is a tool used to identify and reinforce brand awareness. Marketing specialists know how much precision is involved in the creation of a catalog and how much a good catalog can make the difference in terms of sales.

If you’re going to create your first online product catalog, we can tell you how to make a catalog of products that responds to the fundamental objectives of any company ,online ecommerce store and customer.

What is the purpose of your catalog?

Will you be giving up paper altogether and opting for just an online product catalog?

What kind of customer response do you wish to generate?

Do you want to encourage more sales, or change your brand image?

Know your audience

You'll need to understand in depth what kind of customers your catalog is targeting.

A product catalog for B2B distributors, with essential technical data that’s very precise, won’t be the same as an online product catalog targeting young people.

Knowing who your specific audience is, you'll be better able to adjust the style of the catalog: its language, SEO, layout type, and location of items on the page. When your customers find exactly what they are looking for, both traffic and sales conversion will increase as a result.

What is Ecommerce ? Top Advantages of eCommerce: Why You Should Sell Online

To profile your audience, you can make use of website analysis software with heat maps that analyze where your users spend most time; registration and feedback forms from among your existing customers reviews of your products or those of other competing brands and online forums and comments.

How to organize a product catalog

The information we want to insert must be organized considering how the client will consult the catalog. You need to consider many elements: will the client look for products by category, or will he flip through every page? Would the client prefer a paper or digital version?

In most cases, if we are talking about a business catalog, it is useful to organize elements by category or by product attribute, such as price, color, application, and so on.

Catalogs with different uses present a different structure. Think about medical catalogs, for instance, in which articles are arranged alphabetically. Sometimes, it is useful to organize products in an intuitive way or using less strict criteria, maybe mixing the rules. In this way, customers will be more engaged by consulting every page.

Get yourself some good CMS software

Whatever your primary goal might be, you will need the support of software tools that organize your product content and present it in the way you had envisaged, as well as keeping quality at the level your customers expect.

Among the  Content Management Systems (CMS) tools, your star ally is a product content manager or Product Information Management.

With a Product Information Management you can control the content quality throughout the process, enrich the information and keep it up to date on all your channels and platforms. To your e-commerce website platform, your Facebook shop, your Amazon account, your business representatives.

Catalog design tools

The appearance of an online catalog’s features, is very important in the online world.

When designing online catalogs that can be shared, converted to other formats or even printed, the most widespread, powerful and versatile program is definitely Adobe InDesign.

If your goal is to show your products in the most visual and attractive way possible, you should take into account certain aspects when developing your online catalog:

you need to give more weight to your images or to your product information.

you do a product photo shoot with a professional?

Which background colour favors your products the most?

How many images will be shown for each product?

What kind of perspective is best for presenting the product?

These answers will give you very useful information for knowing how to design your product catalog.