Paula Rojas Blog

The most common way to advertise goods or services to purchase online is through a catalog a set of Web pages that contains descriptions and prices of various items.

Those of us who spend several hours a day online begin to think that every kind of content is now available on the Internet, but it’s not necessarily true.

There’s still a wealth of information that’s only available in printed form, and that includes the many mail-order catalogs that are sent out to shoppers.

As I write this, the popular furniture store IKEA sends me a regular sales catalog by snail mail. But the company’s options for shopping online are woefully limited.

If you do have a catalog, whether it’s online or in printed booklet form, you can take advantage of Google Catalogs to help you sell your merchandise and receive payment as well.

Google Catalogs does for sales catalogs what Google Product Search does for individual items listed in online stores. It helps shoppers search through actual sales catalogs that merchants post online.

Rather than a series of hyperlinks, these catalogs are reproduced in Adobe’s Portable Document format (PDF): you flip through them one page at a time as though you’re flipping through a book.

PDF files can be slow to load, but if you can’t get your catalog online any other way, Google Catalogs gives you a good option.

Google Catalogs gives shoppers several advantages over actual printed catalogs: Customers don’t have to order and wait for them to arrive in the mail, and you can search through them by keyword, too. Shoppers do have to call you using the phone number you provide with your catalog.

But many shoppers prefer this low-tech way of making purchases because it allows them to speak to a store employee in person and convey their credit card information verbally rather than transmitting it via the Internet. And it saves a lot of money in printing, paper, and mailing costs.