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.
Top 5 Digital Catalogue Software Providers 2022
YUDU Publisher
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.
Enhance your catalogue with
- Simple quick publishing - you can convert your print-ready catalogue PDF into a digital catalogue in minutes, ready to be enhanced by YUDU's overlay editor.
- Interactive features - embed product videos, create pop-up windows, add hyperlinks and dozens of other features to drive engagement.
- Easy purchasing pathways - build in-catalogue shopping carts and forms to generate direct sales, or sync with your e-commerce website's checkout system. Making it easy for customers to convert.
- New catalogue access channels - create an app version of your digital catalogue for mobile access and extend reach with features like mobile push notifications and offline access.
- A shopping experience optimised for any device - make your catalogue accessible across desktop, mobile, and tablet. With a responsive design that ensures your catalogue looks great on any screen size.
- Personalised branding - build an app matching your existing branding for a seamless experience. Plus, deliver your web-based catalogue from the domain of your choosing.
- Enhanced marketing capabilities - moving online, you unlock new channels to increase reach. Easily share your catalogue on social media platforms and via email. Plus, unlock the power of search engines when creating a plain-text version to be indexed and visible in Google and Bing search.
- Google Analytics integration - bring the power of Google Analytics to your digital catalogue to analyse performance and insight to improve your future editions.
- Lightening load speeds - our publishing platform infrastructure is built to deliver feature rich 5000 page catalogues without impacting page load speed for improved user experience.
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
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:
- Include interactivity by adding pop-ups, videos, and GIFs.
- Add hyperlinks to direct visitors to your external website
- Track user interactions for deeper insight with FlippingBook's own document tracking
- Offer ease of navigation with an interactive table of contents, allowing users to jump about your magazine
- Add personalised branding elements for consistency
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
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:
- Provide a variety of checkout options - WhatsApp checkout, Viber checkout, email checkout and JavaScript integration with your existing webshop and basket.
- Deliver engagement using pop-ups, slideshows, and animations that capture attention and offer interactivity.
- Include your own branding for a seamless experience between your website and catalogue.
- Control catalogue access with password protection.
- Integrate with Adobe and Google Analytics for deep marketing insight into how customers interact with your catalogues.
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
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:
- You can add hyperlinks to your content for ease of navigation, or to direct customers to your e-commerce site.
- Embed images and video to provide additional information and deliver enhanced engagement.
- Use in-built analytics and track key statistics, so you can make better decisions based on data.
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
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:
- You can add interactive elements like video, gifs and hyperlinks.
- Once published, you can host your digital catalogue on your website with an iframe embed.
- Share your catalogue on social media platforms and email by simple sending a web link.
- Offer a device responsive design so your catalogue adapts to the screen size.
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.
Summary
So, there we have it, the top 5 providers of online catalogue software for 2022. 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.