Shopping Cart Tutorials

Creating Catalog pages- Creating catalog pages are necessary for all shopping carts. In this creating catalog pages article, Website Shopping Cart is going to explain to you the basics of creating catalog pages. Creating catalog pages!

Whatever software you’re using in creating catalog pages for your ecommerce site, there are some principles you should follow for best results. This article help you with some of the design basics for creating catalog pages that will work well for you.

Categories

Some retail stores are set up for wandering. They offer the shopper a sense of exploration. It is unlikely that your online catalog should be organized on this principle. Rather, it should help the online shopper find what he or she needs in a straightforward and organized way. You can do this by the pages you create and by having subcategories that shoppers can choose to filter pages and/or reconfigure the presentation of material.

For example, online clothing merchants often offer pages with typical clothing categories: shoes, outerwear, swimwear, women’s, men’s, and children’s sections. However, one not infrequently is able to resort based on brand, price, particular items of clothing, such as sweaters or shirts or pants, and��"at least for some sizes, often plus��"a sized section. As with clothing, for any collection of products or services, the more you can cater to the various ways in which your customers are likely to want to see and compare products, the easier your site will be for them to use.

Your catalog set-up can be presented to your customers in several ways: by tables of contents that let your customers know what types of merchandise you have available; by logical subdivisions of categories; by using multiple ways of categorizing; and by providing clear labels for your categories. If you sell home furnishings, for example, your customers who want to purchase a lamp could be thinking along the lines of "lighting" or "living room furniture." Offering both choices of category gives you a better chance of meeting your customer halfway in their thinking and making their navigation from arrival to purchase easier.

Layout

There are several important points to make about layout. First, it’s a good idea to feature items. These items may be made prominent by placement or by the size of the space allotted to them or by the size of the font and length of the headline that sets them off. If you want your customers to focus on something, give them all the visual cues that will assist them to do so.

Another important point is whitespace. Even if your background is not white, whitespace refers to the portion of your layout that is empty. Whitespace can be used to provide divisions between items, giving the page a sense of order and preventing crowding. For each item, consider what to place on the catalog page and what to show on a click-through to the article’s feature page.

Images

Photographs and drawings are both used for online catalogs. In order that customers may compare, having similarly sized and framed images is important. In addition to showing the front of the item, consider the usefulness of showing the side, the back, and various facets of the inside, as applicable. If you sell briefcases or purses, a view inside may be crucial to your sale, for example. Also consider a fabric or material close-up for any item in which the construction is a selling point. Another valuable approach is showing the same item in the different colors in which it is available in identical photographs.

Add-ons

At some point when the shopper has clarified his or her interest��"either by reading far enough down the page or by placing an item in his or her shopping cart, depending on your approach��"you may want to suggest other products that either enhance the product the customer is showing interest in purchasing or go well with it. Particularly if you are offering a sale on the add-on or the product in combination with another product, at some point, you may wish to let the customer know. How much you reveal and at what point, is food for thought, with different merchants approaching this in different ways.

Beyond the Catalog

A catalog by itself sends a message that you are only interested in the product and not in the customer, so don’t create a catalog alone without supporting material. Think about what else the customer would want to know about your products or services. Who and where the company is? Shipping information? How to get customer service? Store policies? Trends in the industry? Why you stock the items you do?

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