How Do I Make a Simple Product Catalog?

Chances are you have interacted with a product catalog more times than you realize. Product catalogs are a common way consumers find out information about a product and can provide useful information. Let’s discuss more about product catalogs in the next sections. 

What Does Product Catalog Mean?

A product catalog is defined as a document that contains a list of products and any relevant product information. This can include the product description, photos, features, pricing, related products, SKU, etc. Other common terms for product catalog are product guide, buyer’s guide, or product catalogue. 

What is the Purpose of a Product Catalog?

The purpose of a product catalog is to provide customers with a comprehensive list of all the products a company may offer. This catalog also often contains other relevant product data, including related products, sizing information, important features, pricing options, etc.

A product catalog can be beneficial to your customers as it provides a quick reference to find all products, without having to search through numerous sources. Product catalogs can also be useful for internal staff as well. Store employees can use them to look up private information or employees can use it to help identify products they may want to carry in their store. 

What Are Examples of Product Catalogs?

Now that we understand what a product catalog is and its purpose, let’s discuss some examples of product catalogs. Product catalogs can exist for any type of company or industry, however, it is very common to see product catalogs for manufacturing companies. Manufacturing companies may have product offerings such as light fixtures, faucets, home appliances, or lawn and garden tools. Within the product catalogs, there could be a list of all the light fixtures that the company offers. The details for the light fixtures may include product description, photos, pricing, size offerings, similar or related products, etc. 

You might think of a product catalogue as a large, printed book that you flip through to find specific product information. These days, it is a lot more common to find product catalogs online via an online catalog instead. 

An online catalog can offer the same options to view product offerings, but may have more options for filtering and searching for specific products. It also gives you the ability to access from anywhere, without having to carry this large book with you everywhere. 

Ensuring you are putting together a good product catalog can be challenging. Generally, those who read product catalogs are not technical, so it is important to not use technical jargon. Ultimately, a good product catalogue is one that is clear and concise, and easy to read. 

How Do I Make a Simple Product Catalog?

It is common for companies to have created their product catalogs as either a printed version or PDF version. There may also be scenarios where a company has never created a product catalog before. In either scenario, it is still possible to create a new digital product guide. Let’s walk through how to do this. 

If a printed or PDF version exists, then your goal should be to create a digital version that has the same information as your current version. This should be a simpler process, as you already have a starting point for your digital version. After you have launched your initial version of the digital product guide, you can easily iterate on this based on feedback you hear from your customers, partners, or dealers.

On the other hand, if you are starting from scratch, you will want to determine the core product information and related digital assets that you want to include in the initial version of your product catalog. Your first version should be a simple product catalog, as the focus is to get the information out there and available to your customers. Once you have launched your initial version, collect feedback from users. Once you have this, also compile additional product data and assets internally, so this information can be added to a future iteration of the product guide.

Lumavate offers a simple product catalog template that can help get you started. Lumavate’s product catalogue template ensures you can shorten the speed-to-market and get your product catalog in front of your customers, partners, or dealers faster than the competition.

There are numerous options available for catalog design software out there and choosing one for your business can be challenging. A great platform available to use is Lumavate. With Lumavate, you can easily design catalog product offerings for your customers to view. They are a digital experience platform that also has a product information management (PIM) solution available. This means you can easily create a digital experience that can then display the product information you have added to the PIM. Lumavate makes it easy to update your product data all in one place. This will ensure your customers are always viewing the latest up-to-date information. 

Ready to learn more? Take a tour of Lumavate’s PIM.