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Online catalogues: driving sales

by Sara White

Business to business catalogues still have a role to play, but companies are looking for online alternatives to boost sales and generate new clients. Here we consider how to set up an online catalogue.

The growth of online buying means that companies are looking for different ways to reach their target audience on the web.

In a crowded internet world, it is essential to attract buyers to a particular site, while offering them the right environment online to make purchasing easy. The likes of Amazon have defined the online shop, providing thousands of products, comparison features and competitive pricing to retain customers, while sophisticated search engines and analytical tools profile buying patterns.

Despite the growth of the internet, there is still a strong demand for printed catalogues, and while Mintel research points to the decline of the catalogue as internet sales gather pace, there is a halfway solution in the form of online catalogues.

Print costs

There are several factors affecting the decline in the printed catalogue from the expensive printing costs and ever-growing postage bill to the obvious constraints of keeping paper catalogues up- to-date with the latest prices and products.

"Printed catalogues are very expensive to produce and print, and are pretty well out of date as soon as you have printed them. With a digital catalogue you can swap out pages as often as you like," said Yudu's Richard Stephenson

For some vendors, the move to web-based selling has created complex and time-consuming product-oriented web sites, where although the buyer can search for products, there is no real way to ensure that they can find exactly what they are looking for.

Some companies are supporting their online shops with online catalogues, replicating the traditional format of selling with a virtual version of the book, which is easy to navigate, compliments the printed page and can be updated easily and quickly without incurring the huge costs of a reprint.

Integrated selling

On the latest digital catalogues from Yudu Media, the buying process has been simplified with a typical shopping cart embedded into the online version.

The launch of the digital order form last December marked a turning point for Yudu's digital catalogue business. The new form ends the complexities of handling fax orders and speeds up order processing for companies.

According to Yudu, 75 per cent of its business to business catalogue clients use fax for the majority of orders, which can be time consuming and confusing for both the customer and the processing team.

The digital order form works like an online shopping basket, allowing the customer to collate the products they wish to buy as they scroll through the catalogue on screen. The completed form can then be emailed directly to the catalogue company for processing and forwarding to all the relevant departments at the click of a button, including finance, order processing, sales and despatch.

Top tips: getting started

When setting up an online catalogue, here are a few tips to bear in mind:

Convert pages from original artwork/pre-press format (InDesign, QuarkXpress files etc) directly to PDF

Update catalogues by inserting additional PDF pages/spreads

The system automatically renumbers pages

Professional page-turning format with live links

Print functionality

Digital order form/shopping cart feature

Search engine accessibility

Hotlinks to main ecommerce site

One of the reasons companies do not produce online catalogues on their home site is that there are concerns this will divert sales from distributor or dealer channels. The digital order form is particularly useful for companies with distribution-based networks. In this context, companies can clone their digital catalogue for use on distributor sites by personalising the covers and programming the order form to send the customer's order directly to the relevant distributor. 

"The Yudu Media digital order form is designed to increase efficiency and help companies who are still using fax, postal and phone orders to move towards an electronic system," said Yudu Media chairman Richard Stephenson. "This will reduce the man hours needed on the phones taking orders or inputting the orders from fax or mail orders."

Search functionality

When it comes to deciding whether to supplement a printed catalogue with an online version, there are a number of factors to consider. Many specialist buyers still like to have a printed version as it is easy to flick through the pages and find products. This experience is replicated in digital catalogues.

Stephenson said: "With digital catalogues you do not lose yourself. You can turn the pages and search it like a website - you can also browse in a very common way. It is like a complementary element. Printed catalogues are very expensive to produce and print, and they are pretty well out of date as soon as you have printed them. With a digital catalogue you can upload new pages and swap out pages as often as you like. For the best reading experience, you need to be able to navigate and find your way through the book. You need to be able to zoom in and out, and the text needs to be crisp."

In terms of price, the ballpark figure for online reproduction is £8 to £15 per page, assuming you have artwork. The data is live with active search functionality, up-to-date products and prices, all supported by online ordering.

Case study

Radium Lamps produces a number of printed catalogues for its large range of lighting products, including a 220 page technical catalogue produced in three languages for specifiers and architects.

The company recently decided to use Yudu Media's digital content technology to produce its first online product guide, a simplified version of the large technical lighting guides, to test market reaction. Radium Lamps marketing director John Redfern said: "In the past we were always reprinting the catalogue and the difficulty was in keeping it up to date with the changes in products and prices. It is a matter of accuracy - the online catalogue offers these advantages. We have been able to cut down the number of printed catalogues because the online version has replaced it. Now we only print a 1,000 product guides, before we were printing 20,000 copies.

"Customers can go to the guide and get the latest product information. There is the speed of doing it and it is always accurate and immediate. One of the advantages of having a visual catalogue is that you can do more - you can show the different colours of white lighting and add in moving visual material that demonstrates key factors that are important to customers. We can show a short film showing different colour light, for example. It has been a discovery. It brings the products alive and that is critical for us."

"We have cut the number of printed catalogues. Now we only print 1,000 product guides, before we were printing 20,000," said John Redfern, Radium Lamps

Costs have been cut because of the flexibility of the digital format. "When printing, we always needed to add a print section - this can be 16 pages - now we can add or remove a page whenever we want by creating a new PDF and dropping it into the digital file," added Redfern. "We had to adapt some of the artwork for the digital catalogue and removed the page numbers before making the PDFs. As there are no page numbers, the PDF document automatically enumerates the pages.

"The printed product guide used to be 16 pages. We started with 40 pages online, by the end of the year we will have a 64 page digital catalogue.  Once the PDF pages are produced they are uploaded to the Yudu Media mainframe. We got a lot of help and advice from Yudu, based on their experience. When they developed the online ordering, they told us about it right away - this a real tool for our customers. We have seen an increase in sales since the digital catalogue went live - before there was no mechanism to buy online."

Redfern hints that within two years the company will put its main catalogue online, but he believes the digital version will support the printed version rather than replacing it outright for some time.

Flexibility, accuracy and the ability to tailor products for particular target audiences are just some of the benefits of digital catalogues, but the addition of integrated online shopping gives the real edge.

www.yudu.com/catalogues