Online store or catalog website

What is the difference between an online store and a catalog website - which is better to choose?

(This article uses images from a directory site I made)

An online store and a catalog site are two different types of sites. From the outside, they may seem similar - there is a product catalog, product pages, etc. But there is one fundamental difference - an online store has a payment and delivery system for goods, i.e. the ability to buy online. A catalog site does not have this function.

So why choose one type of site or another?

An online store is a more functional site, therefore, it costs more and takes longer to make. But at the same time, it can provide an automated sales mechanism for a business.

A catalog site can also offer visitors the opportunity to buy, but to do this, they will need to leave the site for some other service, for example, a messenger or social network, where the manager will tell you how to buy a product, or for some marketplace. Also, a person, having familiarized himself with the catalog, can come to an offline store and buy a product from a seller there. This is not so convenient, of course. But at the same time, on the catalog site you do not need to register in the payment system, pay a commission for its use, and you also do not need to integrate delivery services into the site. Thanks to this, the site is made faster and requires less financial investment.

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You can choose what suits you best at the moment. Sometimes we agree with the client that we are making a catalog site now, but for the future we immediately include the possibility of connecting a payment and delivery system to it. That is, we immediately plan that after some time we will increase its functionality to an online store.

Advice: if you are at the start of a business and it is important for you to save time + money and you can manually process orders, then at the initial stage you can launch a catalog site. And if you want to save even more, then you can upload products to the site yourself. As a rule, I record a short video tutorial in which I show the entire process of managing a product catalog and make voice explanations.

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