Differences between a shop and a catalog.

A catalog and a shop are 2 phases of a single development, the catalog by itself focuses in the organization and the content for the products sold.

The eShop wires this catalog with a system that allow the products to be sold on line (the cart) while it helps with the management of proceses like taxes, stock and shipping. 

This does not mean that a catalog by itself can’t sell your products. But in a catalog the final order is processed via form, chat or traditional channels like phone or email.

There’s plenty of cases where a business can’t sell directly on a website for different reasons that include regulations, lack of payment channels, low bancarization, or owner preference. Focusing on pure lead generation sometimes works better for the primary directive: selling.

This also gives flexibility to small businesses or independent workers that might not have the budget to implement the payment systems. Even though nowadays these are more accessible, even in developing markets.

My business model is not very conventional, Does an eShop works for me?

The eCommerce development also helps businesses with alternative business models that not necessarily play fine with the fixed linear prices of the usual shop. We are talking about bespoke products, services, subscriptions, downloads or content.

In the end, as long as the product can be specified and promoted virtually, a specialized or custom eCommerce platform should allow the majority of business models to be brought to a virtual purchase process, regardless of their nuance. 

What are the minimal requirements to have an online shop or catalog

After following the local regulations, any professional or business with an inventory or stock of products, services or content can set up shop online. There’s no restrictions beyond those from where you are planning to sell.

You must have a stock, even if it’s only a single product, it might have multiple variations and customizations that make it a line of products in itself. A stock is getting that down to numbers and data.

Even when the business has solid conventional sales channels, you can focus the shop and it’s content in order to improve your SEO.

And that’s is what’s going to bring buyers to your products in the first place, independently of the channels that you might use to take the order; After all, having all the benefits of online commerce does not imply building an eShop like all the others.

There’s lots of business models that don’t fit in the classical eShop paradigm so there’s specialized tools that allow them to have all the benefits of eCommerce, even payments, without having a conventional shop.

eCommerce and Search engine Optimization

A catalog helps to position in search engines the most relevant keywords for your business. They give volume to your web content and provides specificity to the keywords you want to compete on.

A well planed eShop design focuses in the data models from your products or services, trying to get the most of their hierarchies and semantic structure.

Beyond that, there’s lots of tools, conventions and good practices when designing specific product pages so the search engines can figure that they are looking at a product and not some blog or about page.

This is important because you want to rank higher and be featured in the SERPs.

SERPs = Search Engine Result Page.

When we talk about rank we refer to the position where your product appears in the SERPs, the higher the better. And when we talk about being featured we refer to all the other ways in which your product can be displayed in the SERPs in a more visual and specific way, like cards and carousels.

How to engage the customer’s fears of buying online?

Catalogs and online shops were the focus of intense development from the beginning of the WWW days. And by 2010 the tools for everyone to set up shop in a DIY fashion have been available and proven to be popular.

This brought the first wave of eCommerce overcrowding, with brand new tools that didn’t have the time to harden against cyber attacks and were generally pretty restricted in the design, flexibility, payment, and user experience departments.

And don’t forget about all the crooks that found a relatively easy way to set up a fresh channel for fraud, scams, and identity theft.

This lead most consumers to think in online shopping (outside brand name stores) as a sort of wild west. A no man’s land full of hackers ready to rob them, scam them or steal their identity. They weren’t wrong.

The keyword here is trust and unfortunately 10 years later serious business and entrepreneurs keep leaving aside the fact that their brand and eShop needs to build trust.

Note that this is independent of the security of the sales channels, we are talking about if the visitor trusts in your business, for what is visible, to proceed beyond just looking around. And that sales process should also give enough assurance so that it leads the customer to the final step.

A modern and responsive design synced with your branding, low friction, and clear information about support and warranties takes your eShop to the next level where getting orders routinely is more likely.

THE store of YOUR company.

Most eCommerce developments focus on the shop part while leaving the corporate and other info forgotten as a filler losing a great opportunity for trust building and SEO.

Today there’s no reason for sacrificing design for functionality. We all know engineers prioritize function over form, as they should. But eCommerce development is something that’s more on the fields of marketing, advertising and design.

You should always start from your brand to design the whole shop and content, where properly managed design templates play a crucial role in making the transition between the corporate and shop areas uniform and coherent.

Final eCommerce development insights

The development of an eComerce solution goes beyond from simply trying to sell things in a virtual space.

For that we have social networks where anyone can sell almost anything, porting the normal sales process into a virtual context, which takes time and is not viable for high volumes or certain products and services. And lets not talk about trust on social media.

The development of private online commerce solutions gives you complete flexibility and a solid base to build your business vision. Without having to rely in change of policies, limitations or variable costs in 3rd party platforms, and without having to rebuild the whole shop anytime you want to try something new.

Online commerce is not something exclusive for big business, it hasn’t been for  a long time, we are even living the 3rd wave in the eCommerce development industry, and to be able to compete -from the beginning- is essential that your development be at the same level of shops that have been around for a long time and have had the time to perfect their processes and SEO.

With this explosion in competitors, doing it properly is not a privilege, is the very first step to create a viable eCommerce business.