How Your Product Should Look Like in Your Online Catalogue? (Part II)

In Part I of this article I wrote about the main information that a product should have in your catalogue. I mentioned the title –or product's name-, the description and the images. In this second part, I'll like to write about some other information that you can add into your catalogue in order to attract more customers.

Previous Price: Many catalogues show both the previous and the actual price of an item. This is a good strategy only if you can control the situation. I mean, if the previous price is lower than the actual price, it's no good to show both prices because it's the same as saying your visitors "Hey, I just raised the price of this item; you should had bought this article yesterday, jaja". And definitely, that's not polite. I understood that sometimes you should increment the price of an item, that's OK; but please, remember that, in this case, your e-business application should not show the previous lower price. In another situation, if your product's price was always the same, don't lie. Do not put a higher previous price just to get your visitor's attention. That's no fair and you can loose that potential purchase. Be honest. There are other ways to attract your visitor's attention, many of them explained in these articles.

Category: In the internet there are many people that go straight to a catalogue and search for an item, especially if the store has hundreds articles. But, there is other kind of visitors that loves to browse the catalogue's category tree. For them, your catalogue should be correctly categorized in one or more levels, and this depends on the amount of items and their classification. The item's categories should go for the general classification up to the particular one. For instance, if you are selling vehicles, your first level category could be: Cars Vans SAV Trucks

Brand / Author Name: If you are selling books, having the author's name is a must in any catalogue. You should think in having this information not on the description (or not ONLY in the item description) but in a separate key field that can help you group many items with the same key. A books catalogue is a very practical example. Having the author's name you can list all the books of a certain author. In other catalogues, this information is not so easy to determine. For instance, if your catalogue is about furniture, the key field could be the designer, of maybe the collection (2007 collection, etc). Just think in a field that can easily group your products by. Maybe you have more than one; in that case, use them all.

For instance, you can choose an alphanumeric codification that helps you get quickly information of the item:

AA-XXXXXX-BB

Where AA represents the category, the XXXXXX represents the item number and BB the supplier code. Just think in something scalable for your business.

Weight / Size: If your catalogue has not electronic items (such as e-books, papers, etc), I recommend you to include the item weigh ant the item size. Almost always the total cost of shipping depends on this information, so your visitor should know them to take the purchase decision. The item weight is very important for any catalogue. Even you are selling books or phones, the weight is something your visitors always look for. The item size sometimes can be avoided. If you are selling CD the size does not matter, or is not very important, but, if you are selling furniture, your visitors should know the table's measure in order to check if fits in their room.