So, have you ever wondered how many people out there would be the perfect customer for your product on your site that are not shopping on the web? Have you ever thought about the amount of people out there that do shop online, but just aren’t looking for your product? ÊWhat do you do to get your product in front of these customers? Print a catalog.

Why a Catalog?

Your website is only in front of the user that is looking for your product. Nowadays, people aren’t surfing the web and browsing your product by accident. Most of your traffic is coming because someone typed in something to a search engine that directed them to you. A printed catalog on the other hand is always on. It may lay around for weeks or even years without being looked at, but it can be found around the house, in an office or even in a library. When found, you have a potential customer that is browsing your entire inventory. A customer that may have never looked for your product otherwise.

Another great advantage to having a catalog of your products available is word of mouth advertising. Which do you think works better. Someone buys a product from you and tells an interested friend where he got it. What does he give him? A website address. How many website addresses have you seen and planned to visit only to forget it 5 minutes later? Well let’s say this person buys a product from you and a friend is interested. With a catalog shipped with the product, the interested friend can now have the catalog in his hands and look through and find products that he would want to buy. No time to forget about the product or the website address. Once the product he wants is seen, he is not going to forget about it as easily.

Is there proof that catalogs help website sales?

Well, actually there is. Comscore recently did a study for the US Postal Service. See, the postal service is getting hit more and more each year by the loss of revenue to the internet. So it was in their best interest to find out if the online world was hurting itself by leaving the physical word behind when it came to product catalogs.

What did Comscore find out?

Comscore took an online survey, of which all the details are available here. But the main points to come away with are these.

Households that receive catalogs

• are twice as likely to make an online purchase.
• spend more time at retail websites.
• are more likely purchase online with each catalog they receive
• spend more
• shop online more often

So if you don’t have a catalog of your products, you are not doing everything you can to promote your products. You are not reaching all of your potential customers.

With webtocatalog.com, this will become an easy part of your eCommerce arsenal.  For more info on the above stats, go to Comscore.com.

Here is a video to show the basic function of webtocatalog.com. In the video I use a tab delimited text file to create the catalog that I created from the Amazon API. The file has the item, description, price, image url, category, sub category and manufacturer. Even though I use this file, you can use a file generated for your Amazon store, Google Product Feed, Pricegrabber, or any other tab delimited file or excel sheet with at least the above fields.

I have set up a blog at webtocatalog.com.  Since it is getting close to open beta testing, now was a good time to give it it’s own blog.  All info regarding webtocatalog will be available at blog.webtocatalog.com.

It’s official, we are looking for websites to beta test webtocatalog.com,  If you have an ecommerce website and would like to create a paper catalog of your products to send out to prospective customers, go to webtocatalog.com and sign up for invites.  We will begin beta testing soon!

Here are some of the customizable options that will be available in the beta version of the catalog generator.  I am creating a new database since my current incarnation works directly with Valor’s data base.  Once I have the database up and running, I will add the upload option and post the needed format to upload.  Anybody looking to have their product listing part of the beta, please contact me here.

Page Options

Upload custom header or multiple headers per each page.

Upload custom footer or multiple footers per each page.

Upload background for page.

Choose the number of columns per page.

Item Options

Insert one or more images

Change font style, size and color.

Move text and price.

Change line space.

Change item container size.

Insert Column Break Before.

Insert Column Break After.

Insert Page Break Before.

Insert Page Break After.

Insert Background Image.

Change Background color.

Output

PDF

Made some strides today with the auto-layout features that give you a starting point when you upload your products. Blow is a quick example of the output with virtually no customization. Keep in mind, you will be able to customize almost everything by the time I’m done.

Sample Catalog Output

I’ll come up with a list of all of theÊoptionsÊthat will be customizable soon.  Any thoughts?

For years you have been doing everything you can to move your products from paper catalogs to the web. First there were simple product listings online, then came images. Soon you had your online presence as good as the shiny catalogs you had been sending out in the mail.

Now, you have dumped the high priced printing and graphic artists in favor of a simple snap shot and upload to your website. You stopped printing and mailing thousands of pieces thinking you were saving tons of money. Well you were saving money, but at what cost? What about your customers that didn’t come online with you? What about the people who may want your product, but don’t buy online or don’t have the time to surf website after website for it?

What you need now is a simple way to put your website back on paper. A process that avoids going back to the costly layouts and design. You need a catalog of your products to go out with your orders and end up in in that person’s hands that might not otherwise have ever seen your website.

Well look no further. The web app you need to do all that will be available here soon. Keep watching this blog for more details.

We recently added a Fan Page on Facebook for Valor Corporation. ÊI wasn’t certain what we would do with it since Valor is a B2B Sporting Goods supplier. ÊValor does not sell to the public. ÊWithout any mention of it we had a following of about 20 people within 2 weeks. ÊNot big numbers by any stretch, but numbers none the less.

We began by syndicating our Blog Posts to the page along with some videos. ÊStill not sure what we would do with it beyond that, I kind of let it sit for a month or so. ÊWe had more fans come along, mostly employees from long ago and current employees.

So two nights ago, I put a “badge” in th footer section of Valor’s website and almost instantly we added fans. ÊSo what so we do now? ÊThere are some drawbacks to being a B2B and operating in public like a page has you do.

Cons

• B2B knowledge between distributor and dealer needs to remain private
• Prices have to remain private too
• There is no real way to determine who is a customer and who is a casual fan of the items we sell

Pros

• Helps your brand by having your name out there no matter the business
• People who are looking for us have one more place to find us
• Great tool for bringing industry members together

So what would make Facebook more user friendly for B2B?

Controlling membership

It would be nice to be able to keep the fans of Valor limited to our dealers. ÊIf we could do that, we would be able to share more info that we don’t want to share with the general public.

An import method to import our database to facebook and invite our customers to become fans directly in Facebook.

You can invite friends to be your friend, why not offer that ability to companies that are able to invite thousands.

I will do some more snooping around and try some different marketing tactics and report back as to what works and what doesn’t. ÊPlus where the fan page is in a few months.

Do you have a fan page for your business? ÊIf so, what do you share on it?

What would you like to see from Facebook to be more B2B friendly?

Blulyne.com is formerly ASPDesigns.com. ÊMy name is Ben Newton and I have been buildingÊeCommerceÊwebsites since the early 90′s. Ê I have built both internet websites and intranet sites. ÊMy main accomplishment has been the intranet and public website for Valor Corporation. ÊThis intranet is the backbone of a multi million dollar Sporting Goods distributor which handles everything from inventoryÊmanagement to warehouse and shipping operations. ÊValor’s website handles thousands of dealer’s a week and generates over a million dollars in online sales a year with tens of thousands of products.

I have started Blulyne.com as a design company to bring these feature rich website designs to you. ÊThough these sites have been built from the ground up specifically for Valor, they can easily be customized for any business.

I am available for freelance work and have many of the features seen on these site in a “ready to go” state that can be added to almost any websiteÊenvironment.

Keep watching for more information. ÊIn the mean time, if you would like info, please don’t hesitate to contact me.