A Review and Evaluation of Platforms and Tools for Building E-catalogs

The purpose of this paper is to give a comprehensive understanding of the role and importance of e-catalogs in today’s e-commerce strategies. The main contribution of our work is a systematic approach towards the classification and evaluation of platforms and tools used for building e-Catalogs. Further we define e-catalogs in a broad sense and we examine the benefits introduced by their use. We attempt to make a general classification of e-catalog solutions, differentiating them in to three general models. These approaches represent the most common classification of e-catalogs in everyday use. After a short description of each model, a representative tool for each category is reviewed. For the third approach, we evaluate, based on our extension of the evaluation framework first introduced by Ginsburg et al [9], “BookTrade” [8] B2B system. BookTrade incorporates a third-party managed catalog, which we focus on in this description.