How Your Product Should Look Like in Your Online Catalogue? (Part II)

How Your Product Should Look Like in Your Online Catalogue? (Part II) In Part I of this article I wrote about the main information that a product should have in your catalogue. I mentioned the title â€"or product’s name-, the description and the images. In this second part, I’ll like to write about some other information that you can add into your catalogue in order to attract more customers. Price : Many people think that a catalogue without prices doesn’t work in an online business. That’s partially true. If you are selling articles that a visitor can easily find elsewhere, you should print your product prices in the catalogue. If you don’t, the visitor will go to another online store where this information is on and they probably shop there. In other hand, if your catalogue has only exclusive articles that visitors could not find in another place, you can ignore the price (of course, always is better if you have it, but sometimes is good to not publish the item price). If a visitor is interested in that article, you can ask his to fill a form in order to be contacted by a seller or a representative. Previous Price : Many catalogues show both the previous and the actual price of an item. This is a good strategy only if you can control the situation. I mean, if the previous price is lower than the actual price, it’s no good to show both prices because it’s the same as saying your visitors “Hey, I just raised the price of this item; you should had bought this article yesterday, jaja\". And definitely, that’s not polite. I understood that sometimes you should increment the price of an item, that’s OK; but please, remember that, in this case, your e-business application should not show the previous lower price. In another situation, if your product’s price was always the same, don’t lie. Do not put a higher previous price just to get your visitor’s attention. That’s no fair and you can loose that potential purchase. Be honest. There are other ways to attract your visitor’s attention, many of them explained in these articles. Category : In the internet there are many people that go straight to a catalogue and search for an item, especially if the store has hundreds articles. But, there is other kind of visitors that loves to browse the catalogue’s category tree. For them, your catalogue should be correctly categorized in one or more levels, and this depends on the amount of items and their classification. The item’s categories should go for the general classification up to the particular one. For instance, if you are selling vehicles, your first level category could be: Cars Vans SAV Trucks Then, in the second level, Cars can be categorized by brands, or by origin (national / imported), and so one. There are many ways to categorize your items. You should choose the one that your potential visitors mostly use. In some cases, you can also have two or more category trees. For instance, in the same example, you can maintain the mentioned category tree and you can also add another one, where the first level is the vehicle brand (BMW, Toyota, Ford, etc.). Brand / Author Name : If you are selling books, having the author’s name is a must in any catalogue. You should think in having this information not on the description (or not ONLY in the item description) but in a separate key field that can help you group many items with the same key. A books catalogue is a very practical example. Having the author’s name you can list all the books of a certain author. In other catalogues, this information is not so easy to determine. For instance, if your catalogue is about furniture, the key field could be the designer, of maybe the collection (2007 collection, etc). Just think in a field that can easily group your products by. Maybe you have more than one; in that case, use them all. Item Code : Each item in your catalogue should have a unique code. This code can be your internal identification of that item. Even if you are selling products from many providers (and each one of them have their internal codes), you should normalize your items with an internal code. Having a code makes that item unique in the whole catalogue. You can receive purchases by many other ways (telephone, mail, etc) using the item’s code and you can easily integrate internal applications (such as your ERP, your CRM, etc) through this unique piece of information. If you don’t have a codification yet, you should think in one that can really helps your business. For instance, you can choose an alphanumeric codification that helps you get quickly information of the item: AA-XXXXXX-BB Where AA represents the category, the XXXXXX represents the item number and BB the supplier code. Just think in something scalable for your business. Weight / Size : If your catalogue has not electronic items (such as e-books, papers, etc), I recommend you to include the item weigh ant the item size. Almost always the total cost of shipping depends on this information, so your visitor should know them to take the purchase decision. The item weight is very important for any catalogue. Even you are selling books or phones, the weight is something your visitors always look for. The item size sometimes can be avoided. If you are selling CD the size does not matter, or is not very important, but, if you are selling furniture, your visitors should know the table’s measure in order to check if fits in their room. Related items : Once your visitors took the decision of buying some product, you can invite them to buy some other related to the one they choose. For example, if the chosen product is a notebook, you can suggest them to by an extra battery, a computer case, or many other related items to the chosen one. This is also known as cross-selling. The items can be related reciprocal, or not. In the same example, the notebook and the case are not reciprocal related because if a visitor chose the case, you’ll probably not suggest the notebook. Having this option in your e-business application will represent extra margin per purchase and adds value for your visitors. Related documents : Many manufactures publish their detail product specifications or technical information in pdf files (or any other format). If you are authorized by them, you could add this information in your product’s information so your visitors can download that documents and get extra information about the item. Once, in a vehicles catalogue, I saw a movie of the vehicle in a road, as a related document. It was very interesting because that information tries to introduce the visitors the ‘experience’ of driving that vehicle. You can also find this article in goingebusiness.com Hernan Varela is co-funder of Latinvia, a company that provides software as a service. He helps writing articles for GoingeBusiness.com