Business·7 min read
If you manufacture or distribute, your catalogue is probably a PDF. The five signs it no longer works, how to work out what it costs you to keep it up, and the eight questions to ask before you pay for a web catalogue.
The PDF doesn't fail the day you make it. It fails the third time prices change and someone on your team sends out the March version.
If you manufacture or distribute, your catalogue is most likely a PDF. A designer made it a while back, it goes out by email and WhatsApp, and it gets printed when there's a trade fair. It works. Until it doesn't, and you rarely notice the day that happens.
Search for "online catalogue for distributors" and nearly everything you get is a platform trying to sell you its shop or its catalogue builder. None of them tells you when it's worth switching, what the PDF is costing you today, or what to ask before you sign. That's what this article tries to do.
Before you bin it, let's be fair. A PDF looks the same everywhere, prints fine, and the buyer files it away and finds it again two years later. And no, it isn't invisible: Google indexes PDF files, as its list of indexable file types says.
The problem is something else. A 60-page PDF is one single address for three hundred products. To Google, and to an AI assistant, it's one long document, not three hundred products. And every time something changes, it has to be redone, exported and sent to everyone again.
Our rule of thumb, and it is a rule of thumb, not a statistic: one sign, fix the PDF. Two or more, and you're already paying for not having a web catalogue, even if it doesn't show up on any invoice.
This cost doesn't appear anywhere because it's spread across your team's hours, odd invoices from the designer and mistakes that get sorted out over the phone. Adding it up is easy. The numbers in the example column are made up so you can see the maths; use your own.
| Item | Where to find it | Example |
|---|---|---|
| Updates per year | How often prices or the range changed | 4 |
| Internal hours per update | Whoever gathers and checks the changes | 6 h |
| Cost of one internal hour | Your payroll | €25 |
| Designer's invoice per update and language | Your invoices | €300 |
| Languages | Your catalogue | 2 |
| Orders with the wrong price or reference per year | Your credit notes and returns | 10 |
| Average cost of fixing one | Credit note, shipping, phone calls | €60 |
The sum:
With the example: 4 × (150 + 600) = €3,000, plus €600 in errors. €3,600 a year, every year, to maintain a document that's out of date within a week. Yours may come out much lower, in which case switching might not pay off. That's why it's worth doing the sum before asking for quotes.
What the sum leaves out, because you can't measure it from the inside, is the customer who searched and didn't find you.
For something concrete to compare against: a custom corporate website with a catalogue and a panel your team uses to update it costs €1,500 plus VAT with us, paid once, with optional maintenance (pricing). Languages and search are quoted separately, depending on the size of the range.
This is where a lot of quotes go wrong, one way or the other. Hardly any distributor needs a cart with checkout: prices depend on the customer, the volume and the terms, and the order is closed with the sales rep. Adding a shop means paying for something you won't use.
What you do need:
And you don't need to sell online for Google to understand your products. Its structured data documentation distinguishes between pages where people buy and product pages where people can't directly purchase, with a format for each. A catalogue without a cart can be properly marked up.
This applies to us and to anyone who quotes you. Next to each question, the answer you'd want to hear.
To be equally honest: if you have forty products, prices change once a year and you sell to twenty customers who already know you, stick with the PDF. Do it properly, put the date on the cover and upload it to a simple page with your contact details. A landing page is enough.
A web catalogue makes sense when the range keeps moving, when you sell in more than one language, or when you want to be found by people who don't know you yet.
Boix PLV has been making display stands since 1972. Its website runs in four languages, on four domains (.com, .es, .cat and .fr), and has a needs-based search: the customer starts from what they want to solve, not from a product name. It's described on our corporate websites and catalogues page. There are no published results figures for that project, so we won't give you any: what you can see is how it's built.
Do the sum above with your own numbers and put the eight questions to whoever quotes you, us included. If it still adds up after that, get in touch and we'll go through it with your catalogue in front of us.
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