Many businesses offer a range of products or services, often with various options and models. Typically, these have been presented in a printed brochure or catalogue. The Internet provides advantages over the printed brochure by making a catalogue available to everyone, any time of the day or night, anywhere in the world.
If you would like to get straight into detailed information on e-catalogues, download the following publication released in May 2004. PDF From Paper to Procurement - effective catalogue creation and management for buyers and suppliers (574 kb).
This guide has just been produced by the Australian Government (Department of Communications, Information Technology and the Arts) in conjunction with relevant associations, agencies and companies that specialise in the area of e-procurement and e-catalogues. It was funded through the Australian Government's Information Technology Online (ITOL) grants program. The guide is designed to help Australian suppliers publish and maintain electronic catalogue data in a format suitable for selling and buying online (ie e-procurement).
For a general introduction to e-catalogues explore the sections below.
* what is an e-catalogue?
* e-catalogues versus printed catalogues
* setting up an e-catalogue
* is an e-catalogue right for you?
* the challenges
About e-catalogues
An e-catalogue is an online presentation of information on products and services that are offered and sold by an organisation. For organisations that do not have a large range of products or services, putting its catalogue on the Internet is not a difficult task. However, for those with large product lines and many service offerings, multiple buyers, complex supply-chains and logistics, converting to an e-catalogue system is a complex task and requires careful planning and implementation.
One option for using these catalogues is to place them on an electronic marketplace for the purpose of conducting business over the Internet. Electronic marketplaces (or e-marketplaces) are described in the next section.
E-catalogues versus hard-copy catalogues
An e-catalogue has many advantages over a traditional hard-copy catalogue:
* it can be updated more efficiently and cheaply as the publishing process is faster and there are no printing and paper costs
* price changes and availability can be updated immediately a new product or service becomes available or there is a supply issue with a product or service
* it is available to customers anywhere in the world, 24 hours a day, seven days a week
* coupled with an online payment system, it encourages sales and assists cash-flow
* through the use of cross-links and product-to-product association the website can automatically encourage users to purchase additional products (cross-selling) and more of a product or service (up-selling)
* it can improve access to product catalogues by standardising content and providing multiple search criteria so that users can find it easily
* it can provide images and diagrams to demonstrate product features.
There are disadvantages of using an e-catalogue over a traditional hard-copy catalogue:
* if the business has a large range of products or services that change price or availability often, then an e-catalogue requires a sophisticated website solution which can be costly to establish and maintain
* to reap the full benefits of having an e-catalogue, a business would need to coordinate its customer and product databases, stock and inventory systems and financial systems and then ensure that these systems, or at least the website, could talk to the relevant systems of its suppliers and distributors - this is no mean feat.
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