Choosing the right publishing software for your digital catalogue can be a tricky decision. With an ever expanding list of providers and features, what should marketers focus on to make the right decision?
Have a look at five of the best solutions on the market today and see how they compare against each other.
It's hard to remain impartial as a provider of digital catalogue software. We believe our platform offers the tools and superior service helping you deliver a highly successful online catalogue strategy.
YUDU has been developing apps and digital publishing software since the inception of the iPad. Working with major brands across multiple sectors, we've explored and innovated to develop an award-winning digital catalogue software platform. Offering the features and functionality to improve reach, drive engagement, boost conversion, deliver insight, and increase revenue from your online catalogue.
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This is just the start, we've a wider range of additional features. Drop us a line if you’d like to set up a demo with the team and see how easy it is to get started.
FlippingBook's digital catalog maker is designed to help you convert your plain PDF into an online catalogue, ready to be enhanced.
Similar to YUDU Publisher, you'll be offered functionality to enhance your catalogue:
FlippingBook does fall short in two key areas, the absence of a shopping cart feature and lacking the capability to convert your catalogue into an app.
In-catalogue shopping carts are such a powerful tool for retailers. Keeping the customer in the catalogue for a longer dwell time. Allowing them to select multiple products which populate your e-commerce site in parallel for a smooth checkout experience. Ensuring you’re providing the customer with choice - shop from the catalogue, or from the website.
Not being able to deliver your catalogue through an app means you miss out on powerful features. An app allows your customer to carry your catalogue with them, wherever they are. You can connect with and alert them to new catalogues or promotions using mobile push notifications. While offering anytime access through offline availability.
iPaper provide you a collection of tools designed to help drive revenue and engagement from your content and catalogues. They deliver a lot of the foundation features you'd expect from a digital catalogue publishing provider, along with some advanced options:
iPaper is an intuitive, feature rich platform delivering interactive catalogues to the web; while providing marketers with useful insights and tools to help make their PDF catalogues make more sales. However, it's on mobile where iPaper is let down somewhat.
Like FlippingBook, the platform lacks a dedicated app solution to communicate and keep your audience and sales teams up to date with the latest products and catalogues.
Issuu offers marketers the ability to convert their PDF catalogue into a digital catalogue. In terms of a simple conversion, issuu does a great job on the surface:
When it comes to making a purchase, issuu's digital catalogue features fall short. There is no option to add a shopping cart or forms to capture customer information. Instead, issuu offers 'shoppable links' which effectively combine hyperlinks with a pop-up embed view of your e-commerce website. It ends up being a pretty clunk feature that is not very user-friendly.
The ecosystem of issuu is a news-stand of other content creators, meaning that users are just a few clicks away from finding your direct competitors. Depending on what tier of service you choose, issuu will then promote related content to your audience - which makes converting a sale or a customer even harder.
issuu is a great platform for marketers who need to quickly get a catalogue online. But if you want your catalogue to convert views in to sales, then this might not be the best solution for you.
Flipsnack falls more into the realm of a pure digital catalogue creator rather than a publishing platform. However, they do support the capability to upload your PDF and then publish and enhance it.
When it comes to key features, they offer the basics:
Again, it's the shopping cart and app availability that is lacking. Flipsnack state they offer shopping cart functionality, but it's a half-truth. In reality, when clicking on items in the catalogue, the customer is creating a document with a list of desired items that they can then be email to you.
As for offering your catalogue as an app and all the opportunities that creates, it's simply not an option.
So, there we have it, the top 5 providers of online catalogue software for 2024. Packed full of different features to help you boost engagement, increase reach and drive revenue from your digital catalogue.
Before you make your decision and choose a provider, definitely dig deeper. You'll want to compare prices, explore the different customer support options available, and forensically examine all the features on offer.
We hope this guide was helpful! Drop us a line if you’d like to set up a demo with the team and see how easy it is to get started with YUDU Publisher.