A simple 'web ready catalog' is a great first step in using the web to improve your business and better help your retailers in their effort to win online.
What is a Web Ready Catalog?
You probably already have a PDF or Quark file of your printed catalog. This file usually contains product information, pictures, and retail and wholesale pricing. You may also have a spreadsheet with your sku numbers, product names, and pricing, and a CD of web-ready images.
So what's the problem? Isn't this enough information for an online catalog? While you may have enough information, it is not in the right format.
Quark and PDF files are not readable by online catalogs. So the information must be pulled out and formatted into a database. Spreadsheets and image files need to be correlated and descriptions inserted so the right image and description are attached to the right product.
Formatting catalog information is not difficult but it is time consuming. Without a web-ready catalog each retailer that wants to put your products online must take your information and format it. The fact is, most don't.
Try This Simple Test
Can a retailer easily search your site for one of your products and find it? Do they have to download a PDF file and page through it? If retailers can't come to your site to search and find your products, think of their effort to get your catalog fully searchable on their site so their customers can find your products. Then repeat this same effort for each of your retailers.
That's a lot of repetitive unnecessary work. Most retailers will not undertake that effort. By providing retailers with your web-ready catalog your products will show up on more site, be more up-to-date, and generate more orders for you.
Sellsonic Has Answers
From your existing PDF, QUARK, XLS spreadsheet, web images, and other existing sources, we make, and keep current, a web-ready catalog that retailers use to easily and quickly put your products online.
- Each item has your sku, product name, full description, image, pricing, keywords, related items, and section and subsection navigation fields.
- Updated as needed and easily distributed to keep all websites current.
- Your Web-ready catalog will import into any Sellsonic website and with filters many other catalog systems including ebay, yahoo, and amazon. Your catalog on more sites with less effort and cost.
- An instance of your catalog is online under your domain. It is a graphical, fully searchable online catalog that can be access from any web browser -- no PDF downloads.
- Your instance of online catalog can optionally accept retail or wholesale orders on your behalf.
Web Ready Catalog