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? What 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.
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!
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 the options that will be customizable soon. Any thoughts?
