Ahh, the product catalog. Hundreds of pages of beautiful pictures, product descriptions and SKUs. It has been the Gold Standard for manufacturing marketing forever, and will still play a role long into the future. We hear all the time from clients that many of their customers are not technologically savvy, and the only way they will purchase is if they have the catalog. This certainly holds merit, and is a reason we don't believe you take a good marketing piece out of their hands right away.
So, before we break down the reasons to invest in a digital solution to potentially augment/replace the catalog, it's important to define what some of those solutions could be and what they can do, in order of complexity. For the purposes of this blog, we will be talking about web applications specifically.
API - A source code based specification intended to be used as an interface by software components to communicate with each other (per Wikipedia). In layman's terms, it would allow a manufacturer's and distributor's software systems to talk to each other.
Web Application - Web applications commonly include customer portals that allow distributors and dealers to login, view new products and product specs, check stock, place orders, etc... These can also be easily accessed on mobile devices via the device's browser.
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