First, I’d like to thank all of you for testing the site. Your feedback is much appreciated. Please keep it coming.

I have updated the inventory upload to work with more files. There are more variations of these files than I thought. For the best results, use a tab delimited text file or xls spread sheet. XML is not supported yet, so no Yahoo Shopping cart files yet.

If you ran into an error this week, please come back and try again.

If you would like to have your catalog made for you and you will allow us to use it in demos, please email me at ben@blulyne.com and include your inventory file.

Thanks!

Here is a video to show the basic function of webtocatalog.com.  In the video I use a tab delimited text file to create the catalog that I created from the Amazon API.  The file has the item, description, price, image url, category, sub category and manufacturer.  Even though I use this file, you can use a file generated for your Amazon store, Google Product Feed, Pricegrabber, or any other tab delimited file or excel sheet with at least the above fields.

I’m working on a new feature and the option of adding thousands of items if necesarry.  After seeing some of your catalog needs, I quickly realized there may be needs or large catalogs.  I have updated the code and tested it to work with large amounts of items.  I’m happy to tell you it works beautifully.  Technically, you could make a catalog that is as large as a phone book.

Right now, I have the ‘add catalog’ feature turned off while I do a major update to the code for image handling.  This won’t be the norm, it just happened to be a big change to the main structure of the code, so it was safer to take it down.  It will be back soon and I will update this post.

I promise there is a video tour coming.  I just want to get a few more features enabled before it is released.  Thanks to everybody who has already signed up.  I look forward to helping you get your products in front of thousands of other potential custoemrs

The “add catalog” section of the app is complete.  A little more involved than I planned, but that’s a good thing.  I’m very happy with the way it has turned out.  Tomorrow, I hope to do a video to show you a walk through of the adding products process.  It will give you a better idea of what can be done with the app.

Once I have run it through it’s paces for a day or two, I plan on opening up beta testing.  At that point, I will add feature after feature to the edit section of the app.  There is an endless number of features I can add and I am sure there will be plenty I haven’t even thought of.  So please leave feedback.  Tell me what you like and what you don’t like.

With beta testing ready to get going, we have invited many of you to set up your account and download a product template so you can have your products ready.  Though you can still use the template, I am happy to announce you can use any other excel sheet too.  After uploading your inventory spread sheet, you will have the oppurtunity to map the fields in your new catalog to the fields in your excel sheet.

This will enable you to use Amazon feeds, Yahoo feeds and more.

Keep watching.  The beta will open to everyone any day now.

So, have you ever wondered how many people out there would be the perfect customer for your product on your site that are not shopping on the web?  Have you ever thought about the amount of people out there that do shop online, but just aren’t looking for your product?  What do you do to get your product in front of these customers?  Print a catalog.

Why a Catalog?

Your website is only in front of the user that is looking for your product.  Nowadays, people aren’t surfing the web and browsing your product by accident.  Most of your traffic is coming because someone typed a term into a search engine that directed them to you.  A printed catalog on the other hand is always on.  It may lay around for weeks or even years without being looked at, but it can be found around the house, in an office or even in a library.  When found, you have a potential customer that is browsing your entire inventory.  A customer that may have never looked for your product otherwise.

Another great advantage to having a catalog of your products available is word of mouth advertising.  Which do you think works better.  Someone buys a product from you and tells an interested friend where he got it.  What does he give him?  A website address.  How many website addresses have you seen and planned to visit only to forget it 5 minutes later?  Well let’s say this person buys a product from you and a friend is interested. With a catalog shipped with the product, the interested friend can now have the catalog in his hands and look through and find products that he would want to buy.  No time to forget about the product or the website address.  Once the product he wants is seen, with a catalog in hand, he is not going to forget about it as easily.

Is there proof that catalogs help website sales?

Well, actually there is.  Comscore recently did a study for the US Postal Service.  See, the postal service is getting hit more and more each year by the loss of revenue to the internet.  So it was in their best interest to find out if the online world was hurting itself by leaving the physical word behind when it came to product catalogs.

What did Comscore find out?

Comscore took an online survey, of which all the details are available here.  But the main points to come away with are these.

Households that receive catalogs

• are twice as likely to make an online purchase.
• spend more time at retail websites.
• are more likely purchase online with each catalog they receive
• spend more
• shop online more often

So if you don’t have a catalog of your products, you are not doing everything you can to promote your products.  You are not reaching all of your potential customers.

When webtocatalog.com is complete, this will become an easy part of your eCommerce arsenal to complete.  But for now, you can sign up to be a beta tester and get your hands on a catalog ready to print at no cost.  Go to www.webtocatalog.com now for more info.  For more info on the above stats, go to Comscore.com.

Welcome!  We were using our blog at blulyne.com/blog, but as we get going with the beta testing, we clearly needed a place to go over new features as they are added.  So this will be the place.

Thanks to all of you who have already set up beta accounts and have downloaded the excel sheet with instructions on how to get your data ready.  I think an even easier way to get data in to your catalog may be to use an Amazon or Yahoo Shopping upload file.  Let me know if you agree.

If you haven’t yet signed up for a beta account, do so now and get a jump start on the competition and get a catalog out to your customers in time for the holidays.

In case your not quite sure what we do here, let me tell you.  webtocatalog.com is a site where you can upload your inventory data from your eCommerce site and quickly design and download a .pdf catalog to put on your site or print and send out with orders.  Why?  Because not everyone who buys your product is going to be surfing the web looking for it.  Catalogs have consistently been better selling tools tahn even websites.  That is why they have not gone away and they won’t  So don’t miss the chance add the extra customers for your product that are out there.  and do it with out breaking the bank by hiring designers and photographers etc. to make a catalog.  Use webtocatalog.com and have a catalog in days, not months.