Three merchants offer their insights on establishing virtual catalogs.

By Noelle Buoncristiano

Friedman: We spend a lot of time and money to create a page for our catalogs. The Internet wasn’t able to leverage all of that time and money for us. We needed a way to have the customer understand more than one item at a time [as with a traditional site].

We wanted customers to be able to see a complete room setting from our home catalog segment or a few different ways of putting an outfit together. By being able to reproduce the catalog creative online — and then allowing customers to directly make a purchase from that creative — we believe we’re bringing together the best of both media.