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.
Setting up an e-catalogue
The major challenge that small to medium enterprises (SMEs) need to be aware of is that developing and maintaining an e-catalogue is different from updating and publishing a print catalogue. Buyers use different technologies to read e-catalogues, many of which are not compatible, so suppliers - if they decide to sell to multiple buyers electronically - must learn how to adapt their catalogue information to this type of operating environment.
The first step is to develop the business case. Typical questions to answer in developing a business case are:
* Will having an e-catalogue improve my relationships with current buyers and give me access to the wider market?
* If so, what is the cost of creating and managing an e-catalogue?
* What is the Return On Investment?
* What was the time, effort and cost before and after, in terms of maintaining and distributing the catalogues to customers?
* What was the cost of processing orders and correcting errors before and after the use of an e-catalogue?
The answers to the above questions depend, in part, on knowing the options for creating and managing an e-catalogue. The two options are:
1. Contract an intermediary. This could be a supplier hub or procurement service provider or e-marketplace, who can build and host the e-catalogue that potential buyer(s) can then access.
2. Do it yourself and deal directly with the buyer(s) As mentioned above, if this is the case the supplier needs to be prepared for dealing with multiple (and perhaps incompatible) technologies used by buyers.
Is an e-catalogue right for you?
Regardless of which option is chosen, the SME needs to do research to assess the cost-benefit. Typical questions to be asked in this research include:
* What are the technical and operational requirements for engaging an intermediary or buyer(s)?
* What are the costs associated with complying with those technical and operational requirements and the integration tasks needed to make an e-catalogue compatible with the buyer(s)?
* What standards should be used for converting pictures, classifying products and services, describing specifications, defining units of measure, identifying customers, and others?
* What are entry, transaction, service and exit fees for contracting an intermediary?
* If an e-marketplace is chosen -- what is the volume of sales? Who are the buyers (and other sellers)?
* What are the legal and management arrangements of an intermediary?
* Are there any exclusion clauses or practices that prevent participation?
The real efficiencies and productivity gains from e-catalogues are made by linking the relevant parts of the business's database or financial management information system (e.g. MYOB, Quicken, Attache) to the buyer's systems.
The challenges
One of the key questions small to medium businesses need to ask is: with all the technical and operating requirements imposed on me by either buyers or intermediaries, how do I customise my data to comply with their systems, how can I reduce the necessity to re-key infortmation and orders and how do I keep my e-catalogue updated?
To this end, SMEs need to have a well-structured product/service database that uses recognised national and international standards (eg. ABN for business identification, ANZIC codes for industry classification, UNSPC for units of measure, EAN/UCC numbers for product identification). Using such standards means the catalogue information can be mapped, transformed and searched more effectively by potential buyers. This approach reduces effort in recreating and updating catalogue content, can adapt quickly to changing technologies and applications, and provide a basis for establishing a scalable e-catalogue infrastructure.
SMEs need to understand cataloguing as a publishing process separate from marketing and fulfilment operations. This can be difficult because naturally you want to differentiate your products from those of your competitors through a mixture of price, quality and service delivery -- but catalogue information also needs to be structured so that potential buyers can easily access it and be presented with comparable information.
This tension can be resolved by recognising that e-cataloguing is only one component of the wider commercial relationship with potential buyers.
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