Online catalog shopping site Catalog City (www.catalogcity.com), Mountain View, CA, last week announced a partnership with database management company Abacus Direct Corp., Westminster, CO, aimed at providing online catalog buyers with a quicker and more efficient shopping experience.
Through the agreement, Catalog City will capture consumer purchasing behavior from its visitors and put that information into the Abacus consumer information database. In return, Abacus will look to get its more than 1,000 catalog alliance members to become e-commerce partners with Catalog City.
Lee Lorenzen, president/CEO at Catalog City, said that by combining the customer information of the two companies it will help convert online catalog browsers into buyers.
“By knowing what a consumer has purchased in the past,” he said, “we can more easily recognize their likes and better deliver them to where they want to be.”
Catalog City has three types of catalog listings. The first is simply a list of 17,000 catalogs; the second listing is 2,200 catalogs, taken from the 17,000, that have host pages consumers can browse; from those 2,200 comes the third list, containing 475 catalogs with full e-commerce capabilities.
According to Lorenzen, with the help of the new partnership he hopes to get the number of catalogs with e-commerce capability to reach 1,000.
“The key to this alliance is that it gets us closer to fulfilling the promise to our consumers that they will have available to them every item on every page of every catalog,” Lorenzen said. “This allows us to tailor the site so that consumers will not get lost in all of the products and pages and be able to have a very fast and efficient shopping experience.”
Lorenzen said that both groups are hoping to have close to 3,000 catalog members as a result of the agreement.
