The catalog is the most important part of the E-Commerce store. It must be flexible enough to allow you to categorize your product, relate one product to another, be able to search for products in your catalog.

Categorizing your products allows you to create different sections of your catalog such as dishes, pots, utensils, appliances. Within dishes you could have dinner plates, cups, saucers as a subcategory. Also in the dishes category, you could subcategories the style of dinnerware such as country, metro, euro but you also want your dinner plates, cups, and saucers to have these style category so when a customer chooses the country dinner plates, you also associate the country cups and country saucers with the dinner plates.

When a customer chooses the country dinnerware, you should be able to suggest the styles of flatware which would match the dinnerware. Your catalog might be intelligent enough to track which styles of flatware your customers chooses to match your dinnerware. This way, your catalog can suggest based on previous customer choices.

Another method of cataloging would be when a customer buys an appliance, certain accessories should be easily found. When a customer buys a coffee maker, the filters associated with that coffee maker should also be readily available without the customer having to do any research on what type of filter the coffee maker requires. Here the accessories are linked with the product.

Catalogs are created on the website via the store front administrator. The admin section needs to be flexible enough to allow you to setup your catalog the way your brick & mortar store would be. It has to be well planned before implementation and thoroughly tested prior to publishing.