Catalogue or online store? For suppliers who quote

The simplest way to put it is that an online store takes money and a catalogue takes a question. A store needs fixed prices, a payment gateway, shipping rules and stock counts that are always right. A catalogue needs the full range with good photos and specifications, a way to filter it, and a way for a buyer to ask about several items at once and get one reply.

• Your price depends on who is asking. Trade accounts, volume discounts, delivery zones and thirty-day terms all mean the honest answer to “how much?” is “it depends”. A cart can only show one number, and it will be the wrong one for most buyers.
• Buyers need to talk to you before they buy. They want to confirm specifications, minimum quantities, lead times, or whether a 60 micron bag will hold what they plan to put in it. A phone call closes these sales. A checkout page loses them.
• Stock changes faster than the website. One supplier we work with manages stock in a spreadsheet that changes daily. A store that says “in stock” when it is not costs you a customer. A catalogue that says “ask us” is never wrong.
• You would rather phone back within the hour. Many suppliers sell better on the phone than any web page could. The website’s job is to produce that call with the details already gathered.

• Fixed prices and retail buyers. Everyone pays the same price, and the buyer is a person with a card rather than a company with an account.
• Orders come in at eleven at night. If customers shop while you are asleep, the website has to complete the sale on its own.
• You control the stock. You know what is on the shelf and the website can be updated when it changes.

Our own keyboard shop, ROQ Gear, is a store for exactly these reasons. There is one price for everyone, the buyers are individuals, we hold the stock in Durban, and orders arrive at all hours. The browsing part of the site is hand-built so it loads quickly on a phone, and the checkout is WooCommerce with PayFast, which customers already know and trust.

The whole range goes on the site, and buyers can browse and filter it with the photos and specifications they need to make a shortlist. The packaging supplier’s catalogue has 202 products in 22 categories, each with its own page so Google can rank it, plus a category tree, brand pages and search.

Instead of a cart there is an enquiry basket. The buyer adds the items they are interested in, enters quantities, and sends one enquiry. You receive a single email listing every item, the quantities and the buyer’s details, and a copy is saved in WordPress in case the email goes astray. The buyer gets a confirmation. You then quote by reply or by phone, the way you already do, but with the guesswork removed. We built the same pattern on spec for a plastics manufacturer, and you can try it in the Lab.

Your team edits products in WordPress. If your stock lives in a spreadsheet, we can read the spreadsheet so nobody has to type the same list twice. And because there is no payment, tax or shipping logic to build, a catalogue is a smaller job than a store, which matters when the range is large and the budget is not.

Some suppliers have a trade range that is always quoted and a few items with a fixed retail price. In that case the catalogue can include a checkout for just those items. On our sites the checkout is a separate system that can be added later without rebuilding anything, so the usual order is to build the catalogue first and add a store for the products that turn out to need one. Both are described on our ecommerce page.

Should a catalogue show prices at all?

Show them where they are true for most buyers, as a “from” price, and leave them off where they are not. A page with no price at all gets fewer enquiries than one with a starting point, because buyers use the price to decide whether to ask. A page with the wrong price gets enquiries from the wrong buyers.

Can a WooCommerce store work as a catalogue?

Yes. A request-a-quote plugin replaces the cart, and for a small range that is a reasonable approach. For a large range on a slow theme it inherits all of WooCommerce’s speed problems without any of the checkout benefits, which is why we build catalogues as a fast public site over WordPress instead.

Which payment gateway should a South African store use?

We use PayFast by default. It accepts cards, Instant EFT and SnapScan, South African buyers recognise it, and WooCommerce supports it directly. Yoco and Peach Payments are reasonable alternatives. Whichever you choose, the payment itself happens on the gateway’s or WooCommerce’s own pages. We do not rebuild payment forms.

Look at your last twenty orders and ask how many of them a stranger could have placed correctly from a price on a screen, without a phone call. If most of them, build a store. If only a few, build a catalogue with a good enquiry form. If you are not sure, send us the order book through the contact page and we will tell you which one it is before we quote for either.