Most of the nation's largest catalog retailers are already on the Net or are planning to be there. Net catalogs save money because it's far less expensive to present and maintain an online catalog than it is to print and mail one to people offline. Online catalogs also please customers because they can offer more products, more information about each product, faster ordering, and continually-updated information. Your online catalog should leverage the Net's capabilities to add value to the shopping experience. Here are some suggestions.
Organize the catalog logically. Many print catalogs are just a mishmash of products arrayed from one page to the next without any particular organizational scheme. This is fine when you can thumb through pages in an easy chair, but it's death to an online catalog. Your catalog should have a contents page that groups items in departments, and simple navigation buttons that take people to each department quickly. If you have lots of items in each department, list them functionally or alphabetically and offer a quick way to display information about each item.

Watch graphic placement, composition, and sizes. Early online merchants often made the mistake of simply handing a printed brochure or catalog to a storefront designer and having it copied into electronic form. But a graphic that takes a microsecond to look at in print may take half a minute to download to a computer screen from the Net. Graphics may be important to selling your product, but you shouldn't make customers feel like they're wading through Jello to look at them. Use "thumbnail" graphics that show basically what the image contains, and then give customers the option to view a larger version if they're really interested.

Avoid multi-screen descriptions.The whole point of a catalog is to offer a lot of products in a small amount of space. Using long, multi-screen descriptions of any catalog product violates this concept. Readers should be able to learn all they want to know about a particular product by looking at one screen, rather than having to scroll several times to read a windy description. Some of the best catalogs (check out http://www.cdnow.com) use pop-up menus to offer brief descriptions of products without hogging screen space.

Offer a searching function. Ideally, a customer should be able to type in a keyword that describes a category or type of item and then see a list of items that fall into that category, with a button he or she can click to view each item. For example, the Book Stacks Unlimited bookstore on the Worldwide Web (http://www.books.com) lets you browse a collection of new releases, browse titles by genre, or search for a particular book by title, author, or ISBN number.

Consider the non-catalog store. BookServe International also sells alot of books online but they don't have anything like a catalog. BookServe sells ANY book in print or out of print (http://www.anybook.com). They just ask you to tell them what you want and then they find it and confirm the price before shipping. It's a personal service approach for people who know what they want and don't want to waste any time finding it!

Finally, don't reinvent the wheel. A quick perusal of the advertisements in the back of most online magazines will reveal at least one software package that makes it easy to create online catalogs for bulletin board systems or the Worldwide Web. Many Internet mall operators also offer one of these software packages as an incentive to their prospective tenants. Check out these catalog packages and see if they meet your needs. If so, you'll save a lot of time and energy using one of them rather than designing dozens of catalog pages and an ordering system from scratch.