The Product and Service Catalogue

A digital catalogue is where your business shows what it sells: items arranged in sections, each with a name, price, short description and photograph. Its essential advantage over any printed alternative is that changing anything is free and immediate — a price moves, an item sells out and is hidden, a new product is added. What determines whether it works, though, is editorial rather than technical: how many items you show, in what order, and whether you show prices. Get those three wrong and a catalogue with complete data becomes useless.

Prices: show them

The most frequently asked question, and the practical answer is clear in most cases: publish the price.

The usual argument for hiding it is that it "invites comparison" or "makes them call". The reality is that a customer who finds no price today mostly does not call — they move to the next option that shows one, because they have many alternatives.

And those who do call to ask split into two: those for whom it works and continue, and those for whom it does not and end the call. The second group is exactly what one line would have avoided, and they consume your staff's time daily.

The reasonable exceptions are services priced by specification — a construction project, custom design work, a supply contract. There, publish a range or a "from" price, which filters out anyone outside the budget without committing you to a final figure. Leaving the field entirely blank creates suspicion rather than curiosity.

Structure: sections first

A catalogue presenting sixty items in one long list gets read only at the top.

Photo by Olaf Val on Unsplash

Divide items into clear groups your customer understands — not groups reflecting your internal organisation. Customers look for "grills", not "production department two".

Within each section, order by what you want to sell rather than by data-entry order. The first two items in a section receive far more attention than the last, and that space deserves your highest-margin or most distinctive products.

On quantity: a section with more than ten items needs subdividing. Long lists get skimmed and abandoned.

How many items to show

The urge to show everything is strong, and its effect is the reverse of intended.

A catalogue is not an inventory. It is a decision-making tool, and its job is to make choosing easier rather than to display everything you own.

The working rule: show what you actually sell. If you have eighty items and twenty account for most of your sales, start with the twenty. Rarely ordered items compete with important ones for limited attention and make the catalogue feel confusing.

If you must show everything, let the ordering protect the customer: most-requested at the top, the rest in subsections or further down.

Descriptions: answer a question

A good description is information, not praise.

"Excellent product of high quality" says nothing; every seller says it about everything. But "40 cm, water resistant, one-year warranty" answers real questions and prevents a call.

The rule: describe what gets asked about. Sit with whoever answers customers and ask which questions recur for each item. Those answers are the correct description.

And do not describe the obvious. "Beef burger" needs no explanation, while a dish with an unfamiliar name needs a line about what is in it.

Brevity is deliberate: a one- or two-line description gets read; a paragraph gets skipped.

Photographs: consistency before quality

Images influence purchasing decisions inside a catalogue more than anything else, and they are the most poorly executed element.

Photograph everything the same way: same lighting, same background, same angle, same distance. A consistent set at moderate quality looks far better than a mix of professional shots and hurried ones.

The photo must match what the customer receives. A product arriving visibly different produces a direct complaint and a negative review — a problem created by the catalogue that did not exist before it.

Compress images before uploading. A catalogue full of huge files loads slowly, which matters most in premises with weak coverage or for a customer in an underground car park.

An item without a photo looks less appealing next to one with a photo. Either photograph everything or photograph nothing.

Out-of-stock items

This is the most valued practical feature among staff and the most commonly neglected in setup.

An item that has sold out and remains listed gets ordered, the staff member apologises, the customer chooses again — and that cycle repeats dozens of times a day along with the negative impression it carries.

The rule: hide the item the moment it runs out, not at the end of the day. What makes that actually happen is giving the hiding permission to whoever knows — the shift manager or whoever is in the stockroom — rather than restricting it to head office reviewing reports tomorrow.

For seasonal items, hide rather than delete, so they return with one tap in their season instead of being re-entered.

Services are not products

A service catalogue needs different information from a product catalogue, and this difference is widely overlooked.

Photo by Caspar Camille Rubin on Unsplash

Someone buying a product wants: price, size, photograph, availability.

Someone buying a service wants: price, duration, what is and is not included, and what is required of them.

The third point is the most important and most often missing. A service whose scope is not spelled out ends in disagreement: the client expected one thing and the provider delivered another. One line saying "includes X, does not include Y" prevents that before it happens.

Who updates it, and when

A managerial question that decides whether your catalogue stays accurate or becomes an old list in a new format within months.

Name one person responsible. Responsibility spread across "management" means in practice that nobody updates anything until a customer complains.

Set two distinct update moments:

Immediate: hiding a sold-out item, correcting a wrong price. These do not wait, and the permission must sit with whoever discovers the problem first.

Periodic: a full review every fortnight confirming the catalogue matches reality — prices, availability, photographs, and items you have discontinued.

The periodic review is what catches silent errors: a price that changed in the shop and not on the page, or an item withdrawn two months ago and still listed.

A catalogue is not an online store

A distinction worth stating, because it prevents a mistaken expectation.

A catalogue shows what you have and answers customers' questions before they call. An online store handles ordering, payment and shipping — a heavier system needing inventory management, a returns policy and shipment tracking.

Many businesses need the first and not the second. A restaurant showing its menu and taking orders over WhatsApp needs no store. A shop selling on its premises that wants customers to know prices before arriving needs no store.

The rule: start with a catalogue, and move to a store when order volume through messaging becomes unmanageable. The reverse order — building a store before there is demand — spends effort on a system nobody uses.

What the catalogue's numbers tell you

Here is something no printed catalogue can do: knowing what people look at before they buy.

An item opened often but rarely ordered is a significant signal: the interest exists, and the price, description or photograph is stopping the decision. Change one of them and watch.

The most-opened section tells you what people actually come for, which may contradict your assumption entirely — and may deserve moving to the top of the page.

An item never opened is either buried in the ordering or of interest to nobody. The first is fixed by moving it, the second by deleting it.

Reading these figures is covered in analytics: what the numbers tell you.

Start with twenty items

The practical advice for anyone starting: do not wait until everything is entered.

Enter your best twenty items with prices and short descriptions, and publish. Then add photographs gradually starting with your best sellers, and add the remaining items over the following weeks.

An incomplete catalogue available today sells; a complete one waiting on a photo session in two months sells nothing. And later additions appear immediately without changing your link or the stickers already in your shop.

The rest of the company page is covered in a tour of the AurCard dashboard, and restaurant menus specifically in digital menus for restaurants.

With AurCard you build your catalogue with sections, prices and photos, and hide any sold-out item with one tap without deleting its details.