How to create on-line catalog?

In the internet customers are left on their own, there is no sales person or manager who would tell them about the goods or services. Customers cannot take goods and study them carefully. But how then do they make decision? There are only two answers: 
- customer is already acquainted with the product, he/she likes it and wants to buy it; 
- customer liked the information about the product and decided to buy it.

We will consider the second variant, when customer chooses some product only by description given at the site. Therefore, product description should show product to the best advantage and point at those features to which customer pays attention when visiting ordinary shop. When browsing through the web sites, customer sees pictures of goods and reads the descriptions; we can call the totality of this information "product card".

So, at the first stage you need to make a typical product card.

Stage 1. Making product card

Product name
Product description
Composition/Characteristics
Color
Size
Price
Price with VAT
Sale price
Picture(s)

You may exclude those points which are inappropriate for you and add some additional ones. You should pay special attention to pictures of a product. If you are selling clothes, you know that appearance for customer is much more important than any other characteristics. That is why the first thing which customer should see is pictures of products. If your web site is selling CDs and/or DVDs, there should be such positions in the product card as:
- "mp3" (so that customer could listen to an example);
- rating;
- format.

We would like to pay your attention to the fact that any product should have two characteristics for sure; these are: product name and price. All the rest of characteristics depend on the industry.

Product can belong to some certain category of on-line catalog. That is why it is very important to develop such a catalog structure which can be easily understood by users.

Stage 2. Making up a on-line catalog

Any catalog consists of sections. You can use structure of some already existing catalog or make up a new one. It is worth making up (developing) a new catalog if you want to:
- sell not all of the goods, but only some part of them;
- sell goods at special price;
- hold sales and auctions.

Example of a on-line catalog:

You can include special categories such as "20 $—50 $", "50 $—200 $" sub-categories in SWIM category.

Stage 3. Links between categories/products

In case you want to offer customers additional products, you need to create links between products on the basis of some principle. For example, "swim suits" category can linked to "beach bags" category. The next stage is development of online catalog shopping, but this will be the topic of our next article.

Thus, here is the list of documents you need to develop or give to the web developers:
1) Example of current catalog of products.
2) Example of product description(s).
3) Product card(s).
4) On-line catalog(s).
5) List of attendant products (or categories). 

 Having this information, web developers will be able to develop not only catalog design but also e-shop.

By Development for the Masses, your Internet business solution company.