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. We define e-catalogs in a broad sense and examine the benefits introduced by their use. We attempt to make a general classification of e-catalog solutions, differentiating them into 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. (1999), the "BookTrade" B2B system. BookTrade incorporates a third-party managed catalog, which we focus on in this description.