Month: May 2018

The Elements of a Product Catalog: Table of Contents, Contact Info, and Your Story

How do i make it easier to navigate my catalog? Will my customers be able to reach out to me? Does it matter what my business is all about? This catalog digest helps you with all that and more.

Table of Contents

It’s important for whoever is viewing your catalog to be able to easily navigate it and not spend too much time looking for what they need. A table of contents with page numbers and product names can make the shopping experience for the customer much more enjoyable and stress free.

Featuring Images from: Brumleve Industries Wholesale Pricing Catalog

Not only is having a TOC a great way to make a shopping experience smoother, it may help the maker of it as well. If in the future you wish to edit your catalog and add certain products or remove them, the table of contents you made will help you do all this faster. Also having a Table of Contents may also show that you are more professional to the people viewing your product offering.

“Implementing Shopify and having Catalog Machine integrate with it has been a life saver in getting our products, descriptions, and prices automatically imported. We will be distributing our catalog to our wholesale customers. They will now have a color catalog with a much better layout of product, images, and prices”. -Michael Brumleve, Brumleve Industries

Business contact info

Your customers, whether it’s a single individual or a store you are supplying, need to have easy access to your contact info. Make sure to include it either on the first few pages of your catalog or potentially at the end.

Featuring Images from:  Seattle Pump and Equipment Vac-Tools & Accessories Catalog

 

“I found Catalog Machine through the Shopify App Store and immediately began working on our company industrial tools catalog. 2 weeks later I had an extensive 179 page tools catalog filled with hundreds of products that my sales team and customers could use immediately. Something I was dreading became a fairly simple and enjoyable process thanks to Andriy and Catalog Machine!!”- Cole Childers, Seattle Pump & Equipment co.

Tell your story

One of the pages from your catalog can show your vision, how your business started off and what it is that inspires you and everyone involved to keep going with it. You shouldn’t be afraid to self promote.

Featuring Images from:  V’Enza Creations LLC Wholesale Catalog 2018

“I use the catalogs as 3 different options at the moment. I have LOVED having these, they allow me to change things if needed and I have viable information I can instantly send to potential clients!”- Sheila Vaske, V’Enza Creations LLC

Effective storytelling will get the customer engaged. And since you’re marketing your product and business with the catalog anyways, you shouldn’t hesitate to let the customer know a bit more about who they are buying from.

 

For the full galleries featured here you can visit the links below:

https://www.catalogmachine.com/brumleve-industries/catalogs/wholesale-pricing-catalog.html

https://www.catalogmachine.com/seattle-pump-and-equipment/catalogs/seattle-pump-and-equipment-catalog.html

https://www.catalogmachine.com/venza-creations-llc/catalogs/venza-creations-fall-2017.html

Optimizing your E-commerce Ad Channel practices, and your customer’s checkout experience.

Which social media platform is best for your brand and how do you reach the maximum amount of people with it? What are the reasons for your customers abandoning their shopping carts?

The Ad Channel for your brand

There are so many options for where you can advertise your business. Facebook, Amazon, Google and many others are available, and may be hard for the average person to figure out in terms of optimization.

Both Facebook and Google can be very competitive for getting what you want out of the advertising done, as grabbing your audience’s attention may be challenging at times due to competition. There is a difference though, as your brand can be discovered randomly on Facebook while it’s more likely to be researched on Google. Both tend to be expensive options for raising brand awareness.

Amazon on the other hand has a better ratio in terms of spending on advertising versus the return mostly. They are a newer player of course when it comes to advertising on their site, which may lead to some negative aspects like limited ad space. But one can see why it would be lucrative to actually advertise where people come to MAKE their purchases.

Source: 

Facebook, Google, Amazon: Which Ad Channel Is Right for Your Brand?

The right time to post your content

So you have great content to post on your page! That’s good, but sometimes that may not be enough. For instance, at what times are you posting this content? Depending on the platform, people utilize them differently based on a variety of factors, so there isn’t that one ideal time-frame. According to research though, here are optimal posting times broken down based on the various platforms:

  • Facebook: Thursday, Friday, Saturday, Sunday
    9 AM, 1 PM, 3 PM
  • Twitter: Wednesday
    12 PM, 3 PM, 5-6 PM
  • LinkedIn: Tuesday, Wednesday, Thursday
    7-8 AM, 12 PM, 5-6 PM
  • Pinterest: Saturday, Sunday
    2 PM, 9 PM
  • Instagram: Monday, Thursday
    8-9 AM, 5 PM
  • Google+: Wednesday
    9 AM-1 PM

Source: 

The Best Time to Post on Instagram, Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn, Pinterest, and Google+

Creating a better online checkout experience

When shopping online, people tend to change their minds much easier than if they filled up an actual shopping cart with items and were near the checkout line at the local grocery store. There’s less commitment needed when shopping online and the consumer feels this. Here are the top reasons for why customers abandon their shopping carts. After looking through this, make sure to streamline!

· Extra costs
· Account creation
· Too complicated
· Didn’t know total cost until the shopping cart
· Website errors

Optimizing the user checkout can be simply or may require you to change your entire layout. Here are some basic ideas for changing the way your customer sees their final steps of shopping at your online store:

· Show the multi stage shopping process to the shopper so they know what they’re doing and what’s coming.
· Don’t force them to register.
· Make order modification and back buttons available.

Source: 

How to Build an Effective e-Commerce Shopping Cart