The world has gone Internet savvy. Business worldwide are queuing up for a website, since they want to take advantage of the Internet as a sales medium. As a result, almost everything is prefixed with an “e” - ecommerce, ebook, ezine, ebrochure and ecatalog. eCatalog or flash catalog is one of the latest innovations in this genre.

Surely, you must remember those lackluster paper catalogs that you received via mail. I won’t say that all paper catalogs are useless; a few of those catalogs must have had useful product listings. But nevertheless, I am quite certain they often found their way into the dustbin, primarily because they were not easy to store for future use. And when you finally made up your mind to purchase the product you selected off the catalog, the catalog itself was no where to be found. This is where an eCatalog saves the day.

An eCatalog is an online version of a paper catalog. Since it is hosted on a web server, it is available online 24/7. Prospective buyers simply need to log on to the product website in order to look at the eCatalog.

For Online Shoppers - Page Flip Catalog provides an intuitive interface to browse through the product listings. An eCatalog is made in the form of a virtual flip book. Every page shows a single product or a bunch of products, as per the catalog owner’s will. It features a 3D page flip effect. An eCatalog can be flipped in the same way as you flip through the pages of a paper catalog. This can be achieved by dragging the corners of the pages, or by using the navigation panel.

The navigation panel also allows you to move to a specific page in the catalog by specifying the page number - this comes in handy if the eCatalog has hundreds of pages. You have a scrollbar as well to allow quick and efficient navigation. Yet another awesome feature of the eCatalog is zoom. Internet Shoppers may zoom any product page up to an incredibly high level of detail - more than 300%. Printing any page is also simple, and can be done by a simple click. The eCatalog or 3D flash catalog uses a “load on demand” feature to make the catalog extremely fast loading. In conformation with Web 2.0 standards, the eCatalog also has a “Tell a Friend” feature.

For Sellers - Flash Catalog shortens the sales cycle by bringing the products right to the customers’ computer. This further results in higher sales. With an eCatalog to showcase their products, online shopping cart owners may do away with the expensive paper catalog, and save thousands of dollars in printing and postage costs.

Moreover, the cost of acquiring an eCatalog is nothing compared to the cost of getting a paper catalog printed and posted to prospective buyers. Updating a flash catalog is easy enough, and hence your online catalog always shows the latest products on offer. So if a product runs out of stock, you may easily remove that from the eCatalog. You can use an eCatalog to make a lot more than just product catalogs. Online businesses will find multiple applications of an eCatalog - brochures, magazines, newsletters, leaflets, and photo albums are some of the uses.

In essence, an ecatalog or flash catalog is an awesome web application for both Internet buyers and sellers. It expedites the sales process and hence gets more sales for the seller. And it offers ease of shopping to buyers by providing an innovative and intuitive interface.

Tags: Business

Share This

If you're new here, you may want to subscribe to my RSS feed. Thanks for visiting!