Once products are going onto a company website the question splits straight away: catalogue or ecommerce? Most people look for the answer in whether there is a basket button. It sits somewhere else, in where the price is formed. If a product’s price can be read off the list, a bottle size or a trim and colour pairing, the sale can close on screen and your site is an ecommerce site. If the price depends on the condition of one particular item, or is settled in conversation between buyer and seller, the site’s job is not to sell but to put the product in front of the buyer looking for it, and your site is a catalogue. Both answers are written out here, and the test is applied per product rather than per company, because one company can need both.
Where the price is formed
When a price is already written down, a screen can read it and close the sale. When a price comes out of a conversation, a screen cannot hold that conversation, and a basket built there stays empty. That is the whole boundary between a catalogue and an ecommerce site.
Which unit the price belongs on is another article’s subject: modelling product variants works through it, and the single sentence taken from it is that whatever carries its own price and stock is the sellable unit. Our e-commerce service page builds the store on that unit. This page stands one step earlier and asks a coarser question: is there a unit that will sell again and again, or is every item one of a kind?
The site where a catalogue is the right answer
This section is written out in full, because a catalogue is not an ecommerce site with a piece missing. If every item you list is unique, if its price is negotiated afresh according to its condition, and if a buyer and a seller stand on opposite sides of the screen, the site’s job is to bring them together rather than to sell. A checkout added there brings no gain; it is the upkeep of a step nobody will use.
Plastik ve Makina publishes machinery listings, and the sale does not close on the site. The platform stays out of the deal itself; price and terms are talked through between buyer and seller, and payment stays between them as well. The site’s work ends when the listing stands in front of the buyer looking for that machine. Plastik ve Makina has no basket for that reason, and that is not a gap but the test’s own answer.
The KGM SsangYong Showroom Kiosk is the same answer seen from another side. The floor itself limits how many cars a showroom can show; the kiosk puts the entire range on the dealership’s own screen, and a visitor compares the equipment packages without asking anyone. The sale, though, stays with the consultant: there is no basket and no payment on that screen. On this page the kiosk shows something narrow: even a product with a fixed price is presented as a catalogue when the sale closes somewhere other than the screen. Which pre-sale steps can be handed to the customer is measured separately in self-service pre-sale steps.
The site where ecommerce is the right answer
When the price is already written down, the screen can close the sale; that is the whole condition for ecommerce. At Kokudankokuya a scent is listed once, and every bottle size sells as a unit of its own, priced and stocked separately. When a visitor picks a size the price is not discussed, it is read; the basket takes that unit and the sale ends on screen. Kokudankokuya is a store rather than a catalogue for exactly that reason.
At the KGM SsangYong Online Store the breakdown runs deeper and the test is the same. Every trim and colour pairing carries a price, an image and sales terms of its own; as a visitor configures the car the price forms from the choice, and the configuration travels on into payment. Nobody in the online store enters a choice twice, because whatever the price was read from is what checkout receives. The same brand runs a kiosk on the showroom floor and sells on its own site, and the two answers do not contradict each other: on the floor the consultant closes the sale, on the site the screen does.
The site where a ready-made package is the right answer
If your price is read off the product list and that breakdown fits a ready-made package’s product record, the package is the right answer; putting custom software on top of a package that already carries your breakdown means maintaining a codebase you did not need. Custom work comes up only when the breakdown does not fit, and whether it fits is something your catalogue tells you. At Kokudankokuya the same scent sold in several sizes and the standard product model pressed those sizes into a single row; at the KGM SsangYong Online Store the price hung on the pairing of trim and colour. In both cases the reason was the catalogue’s own breakdown, not a general shortcoming of packages.
The table applies the test row by row: where the price is formed, whether the same product sells a second time, where the site’s job ends, what stock means, and how many sellers face the screen. If you land on the catalogue side in every row, what you are building is not a store; how that kind of site gets built is covered on the web development page. If the rows fall on the ecommerce side and the breakdown does not fit a package, the e-commerce page starts there. If your products split between the two sides row by row, that is not a contradiction but two answers given per product, so follow whichever page each product points to.