This guide walks you through how Amazon sellers can create and market your own product catalog PDF, growing it into an additional sales channel.
Having a catalog PDF is important because you can highlight your products in a curated and controlled manner, and generate sales – all with almost zero extra cost.
For most sellers, Amazon is both a blessing and a curse. Selling on Amazon is like being a continuous cage fight that bring your products in front of millions of eyeball every single day.
This is why having an additional sales channel like your online catalog PDF could help your brand stand out and generate more sales outside of Amazon. Below is a breakdown of the top 3 benefits Amazon sellers could get from having a product catalog PDF:
For active Amazon sellers, creating a catalog is a relatively low cost effort that could yield great financial result.
This is because your products listed on Amazon would have been ready with details like product title, SKU, and product photos. Putting them together as a product catalog PDF can be done easily, using any design or even text editor software, at almost no additional cost.
Once you have a PDF catalog, you can then market it in different ways to customers beyond Amazon – which we will discuss later in this same guide.
Does online PDF catalog actually work?
We have talked to a number of ecommerce operators, and they have shared a common answer:
Given the low cost to create and publish a catalog, they have seen their catalog PDF reliably generate 6-10x revenue that they cost to publish.
Some of the operators even go the extra miles to add UTM tracking links into their catalog PDFs, and the results is aligned with the above. This may not be obvious but having an catalog essentially lets you showcase your product in the most sales-optimized way unique to your product – something that is not always true for Amazon listing.
Most Amazon sellers we talk to would introduce new products (ranging from tens to thousands of new SKU) every year.
To the untrained eyes of your customers, these new products are often blended in with your existing product listing on Amazon and didn’t end up getting the attention they deserve.
Publishing a seasonal PDF catalog gives you the superpower to highlight and announce your best new products of the season for your customers – minus all the distractions brought on by your old products.
Your catalog is essentially a PDF file with comprehensive product information like product title, product images and SKU variant.
Optionally you can include details below to strengthen your brand’s position:
Most of these information can be pulled from your Amazon store and your own website. Once you have all these information ready, you can pass them to your designers or outsource to a catalog design agency to turn them into a PDF catalog.
By this time, you should have had a launch date in mind.
In between creating your catalog and the launch date, it is beneficial to put in the time for pre-launch marketing.
The purpose of this is to create hype and build up expectation towards the upcoming products – thus the catalog.
You can do this simply by talking about the catalog via your social media profiles and mailing list in the weeks/days leading up to the launch. Here are some ideas on how to structure your social media posts and email content:
Don’t be afraid to post them multiple times till the catalog is ready.
If the 2 steps above are done well, you should now have a PDF catalog ready to be unveiled; and hyped up customers ready to chew into it.
Upload your catalog PDF into a trusted catalog hosting platform like Titlegram. This would let you share your catalog easily as a professional branded URL.
With this URL on hand, you can then start sharing your catalog on all your marketing channels:
Website
– Create a banner about your catalog and share it on your homepage.
– Create a page to include the PDF catalog URL, together with preview images.
– Update your website menu to include the catalog URL.
Social media profiles
– Create post on all your social media profiles.
– Don’t be afraid to run ads to get further attention.
Mailing list
Send out email to all your subscribers regarding the PDF catalog.
Trusted network of influencers and loyal customers
Send your trusted supporters a personal note about the catalog; invite them to provide feedback and share it with their peers.
Q: Should I worry about printing and mailing my catalog?
If you are operating only in the online space, you should not be concern about printing and mailing the catalog.
On the other hand, if your business has considerable customers coming in from offline channels, then you can consider printing and mailing it.
Q: Is publishing my own PDF catalog against Amazon’s terms?
When you publish your own PDF catalog, it should be designed for non-Amazon customers. This could be your end consumers, or business customer like wholesalers.
As long as you don’t actively share the PDF catalog on Amazon itself, the act of having a PDF catalog is not against Amazon’s terms.
To recap, having a PDF product catalog is a proven sales channel that works for Amazon sellers. It requires low cost of investment, and would continue to capture more value than the cost required to publish it.
With a sound pre-launch and launch plan, it is a no-brainer to start introducing product catalog PDF as your new sales channel.