It’s that time of year….catalog development season. Picking new products, removing old ones. Making the pages look nice and well organized. It’s quite an undertaking! So, with my brain swimming with hundreds of catalog pages I’m working on, I started to think about our catalogs and how customers use them to order safety products, versus going on the web or walking into a store.
In a catalog space is limited. So, companies (like mine) are forced to put the best of the best – the most popular and best selling products. Then we organize the pages, double and triple checking everything before it goes off to the printer. Reams of paper later…a beautiful catalog in your mailbox. You can easily flip through it and see all of the safety products a company has to offer, pull out pages, save pages or share the book with others in your facility or office. It’s a useful tool for lots of people, especially in places where the web might not be readily available – like plant floors and outdoor work sites.
Then, you have the web. Space on the web is endless. A company can post as many products as they want on the site. They can be easily modified and updated too. Products are easily searchable, readily available and can be ordered any time of day with the click of a few buttons.
What about the store? In a store, people can walk in to browse and choose a product. Being able to touch and see the product is a benefit that the web and catalogs cannot provide.
So which is better? For me, I’m extremely comfortable with using the web to shop for everything and anything. But, I know plenty of people that would rather have a catalog or booklet in hand to flip through and shop from. Others prefer to go to a store and physically browse products to find what they are looking for.
So as I sit in a mountain of catalog pages, I ask you…which way do you prefer to shop for safety products?
