How does the E-catalog works?

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Market and Promote Your Products the Digital Way

webShaper e-catalogue is a web application which delivered completely through the Internet, eliminating the need to install or maintain any client software. There is no need to purchase any additional hardware or software. If you already own a website and is hosted in windows environment, webShaper e-catalogue can be easily installed on your current web hosting space.

User Login

When a user wants to make changes to the online catalogue, they first login to the system via a secure login. (For extra security, please consider to implement SSL Certificate). Once the username and password have been authenticated, they can start adding new products or update existing products info.

Create New Products or Update Products Info

Any additions or changes to the online catalogue can quickly be achieved via the Product Catalogue Manager which the navigation is designed to mimic the Windows Explorer. Every folder represents a category while the box icon inside the folder represents the product. You can create Unlimited categories, subcategories and products. Furthermore, you can Relate Products (e.g. Relate a bluetooth headset to a mobile phone) as well as Attach Files (e.g. mobile phone technical specification) to the products item. All the details are being stored in the database.

Featured Your Product & Market It

Home Page (Front Page of your website) is the most prominent page of every website. Any products you wish to highlight can be easily featured on the Home Page using webShaper Featured Function. After that, you can easily market your products to hundreds or thousands of customers using the built-in newsletter module, by just simply "Copy and Paste" the products shown at your online catalogue to the content body plus some extra marketing details, and send it out to hundreds or thousands of your customer or subscribers, almost at a cost of next to nothing.

Get Indexed and Get Found

After you LIVE your Online Catalogue, it is important for your products on your online catalogue (website) to be CRAWLED and INDEXED by major search engine spiders (the software that search engines use to explore and index websites) from Google, Yahoo! & MSN, so that your potential customers will be able to FIND YOU when they do a specific search which relate to your products. Thus, webShaper e-catalogue search engine friendliness is built-in from the ground up, it helps your products to be found by:

• PRODUCT MAP: webShaper e-catalogue will automatically generate a list of product within one single page to ease the indexing of the search engines' spiders. The spiders wouldn't miss another products listed on your online catalogue again.
• PAGE TITLE: Given the most weight by search engines out of anything on your website pages, thus we automated the creation of title tag using the category name and product name.
• META TAGs: Meta Description is automatically generated using product short description, while you can specify the Meta Keywords during creation of products.
• ALT TAG: Search engine cannot tell what your picture is about. Thus ALT Tag is generated using your product name to "properly describe" your pictures.

Follow-up on Enquiries

It's important to convert your online visitors into customers by inviting them to ACT. They won't act if there isn't a clear call to action for them to take the next step. The e-catalogue is designed to encourage your website visitors to make enquiry about your products. They only need to click on the buttons appear on your product page to send you an enquiry if they interested in finding more about the products. Or they can easily email those products details to their peers or friends. Whenever you receive an enquiry, webShaper e-catalogue will send you a notification via email. Every enquiry will be stored inside the database for ease of follow up and tracking purpose. As a result, you would not miss a single online enquiry again.

Know Your Visitors

To know the effectiveness of your online catalogue, it is important for you to have a detailed understanding of who actually visit your website. Ok, how do you do that? Simple, most of the time, this website statistic tools comes bundled together with your web hosting services which will required a login name and password to access. However, we reckoned not every web hosting company will provide you the tools or share their know-how with you on how to fully utilize this powerful tracking tool. Thus, webShaper e-catalogue has an interface to let you easily install 3rd party web statistical tools like StatCounter (Our all time favorite, installed on this website currently) and Google Analytics. StatCounter is a simple to use yet powerful tools to track your website visitors. It tells you where your visitors came from, the country of origin, keywords that actually lead to your website and more! It's really easy to sign up and they actually give you a FREE account which tracks the last 100 logs of your website. Google Analytics is also a FREE service. It's very powerful and it comes integrated with the Google Adwords report, which is a perfect combination for users currently advertise their products and services via Google Adwords. For optimum overview, you should have both installed! (Warning! Having both counter installed might slow down your website loading speed, this is the only "side effects".)

Fine Tune Your Strategy & Grow Your Business

All done? This is only your first step towards the e-commerce process. After all, there are literally Tens of Millions of website around the world, and Billions of pages of web pages being indexed by search engine. It's a *MYTH* that if you build it, they (your customers) will come. You need to proactively market your website. Check out our articles titled "Submit Your Website the Free and Easy Way" for a list of online directories/e-marketplace/search engine where you can submit your website for FREE! After knowing where you visitors coming from, and enquiries you have received over a period of time. You need to fine tune your marketing strategy accordingly. For e.g. If you are targeting local markets while you have a substantial visits from a country like Japan, it might be an opportunity for you to market your products to the Japanese. The bottom line is, webShaper e-catalogue helps you to save time & money in updating your online catalogue, speed up your time-to-market and most of all, getting your products to be indexed and be FOUND! Check out the detailed list of benefits.

What's NEXT?

After you establish your online catalogue, the next things you want to do is enable your customers to order or make payment to you online. The suitable types of applications really depend on how you are running your business. If you are relying on dealers to distribute your products to the masses, a password protected dealer net system which let your dealers create Purchar Order (P.O.) online, track their outstanding balance are most suitable. While if you sell direct to the end users, you can easily upgrade to our webShaper e-commerce software to start selling to the world in real time.

Do you need something that webShaper e-catalogue cannot offer? Please check out our Customize Programming Page for more info.