Catalog Age Article For Free

Just as restaurants offer menus to influence their customers' food choices, retailers create product catalogs to help consumers make more informed purchasing decisions. Product catalogs outline the most important product details to help guide buyers through the purchase process.

Catalogs can promote a business's brand by displaying them in high-traffic areas and distributing them in stores. Customers often have an idea of what they want to buy after looking through a catalog. But, they'll likely find other items they want to buy when they go online or to a brick-and-mortar store to order.

They Open Channels These shoppers were found to spend 150% more than new customers who had not received a catalog. This study indicates that catalogs can effectively convert and motivate customers, yielding shoppers who are both ready to buy and willing to spend a bit more.

Product catalogs help businesses improve conversion rates as salespeople, and customers/prospects can have contextual conversations instead of spending time on problem discovery and solution. When customers have all the data that they need, they can seek approvals, make decisions, and buy products more efficiently.

Catalog retailers slashed mailings, and some abandoned catalogs altogether, after a major U.S. Postal Service rate increase and the start of the recession in late 2007. Catalog numbers dropped from about 19 billion in 2006 to an estimated 11.5 billion in 2018, according to the American Catalog Mailers Association.

A catalog merchant (catalogue merchant in British and Canadian English) is a form of retailing. The typical merchant sells a wide variety of household and personal products, with many emphasizing jewelry.

Today, e-commerce has largely supplanted mail-order catalogs, but many companies continue to send physical catalogs to consumers' homes. Some companies have remained entirely virtual or mail-based, while some catalog companies have opened retail locations.