Learning How To Create B2B Digital Catalogs, Part 1

There’s no denying that more and more businesses are jumping into the B2B e-commerce space now more than ever before. According to Forrester, the online B2B market is forecasted to grow from $899 billion at the end of 2017 to $1.2 trillion by 2021.

As B2B e-commerce continues to grow and develop, online product catalogs are rapidly gaining popularity.

Online catalogs allow sellers to quickly adjust active products’ pricing, availability, and other details, in real time rather than the stagnant reality of print catalogs.

Even more, sales representatives can easily maneuver through digital pages via their laptop or iPad, rather than shuffling through copious amounts of paper.

If your business hasn’t created an online B2B e-commerce catalog, now is a good time to get started.

Gather the right team

Creating a successful online product catalog will be much more effective with input from the proper stakeholders.

As the front-line person, sales representatives are aware of buyer pain points and they know what’s important to their clients. Don’t underestimate the value of your sales people, they can provide valuable insight.

Having a dependable web design and development team will ensure that ideas can be supported on an online platform. 

Optimize for Buyer Behavior

Your company’s B2B digital catalog should be designed based off your customer’s buying patterns, so knowing your target audience and their buying behavior is key to creating a successful B2B online catalog.

Here are three ways in which you may choose to organize your catalog:
1. Brand or line
2. Product category
3. Seasonally

The organization of any B2B digital catalog should be driven primarily by your customers' buying patterns.

If you're selling products seasonally, for instance, and you’ve categorized your catalog by product type, you will face problems showcasing seasonal collections to customers.

Alternately, seasonality might be a key part of your business.

If that’s the case, organizing products by season will help ensure that buyers are viewing seasonally appropriate products and it will also help your business conduct any pre-season selling or off-season sales initiatives.

If you sell multiple licensed brands or product lines then this organizational method will likely be best suited for your company. Buyers will access your online catalog and immediately view the brands or product lines they are most interested in purchasing.

There’s nothing wrong with incorporating a hybrid approach.

However, be careful that you don’t start adapting too many ways of organization because your goal should be to keep it simple.

Creating a productive team and determining your consumers buying patterns are the first steps in the B2B catalog process.

Once you have a plan in place you are ready to move to the design stage, which includes quality photography, writing concise product descriptions, branding, and more. Find out more in the next video. Check back.

Contact WebRevelation today for B2B website services. 817-283-3324.