Do you need e-commerce, or just a catalogue people can actually read?

Somebody at a trade fair tells you competitors are selling online now. You come back and ask your vendor for e-commerce. The quote arrives at six lakh and the project stalls.

Worth separating two things here, because they get bundled and they shouldn’t be.

The catalogue does most of the work

A catalogue is every product published as a page a buyer and a search engine can read, following the nine field template. Specifications, photographs, applications, enquiry button. No cart, no payment, no stock sync.

This is what actually brings enquiries. It’s what makes you findable. It’s a fraction of the cost of a transactional store, and for most B2B businesses it delivers the great majority of the benefit.

When you genuinely need the cart

• Your prices are fixed and public. If every order is negotiated, a cart is fiction.
• Orders are small and repetitive. Consumables, spares, standard items that customers reorder without discussion.
• You can fulfil individual small orders. Packing and shipping one item is a different operation from despatching a truck.
• Somebody owns it day to day. Stock, dispatch, returns, payment failures. A store is an operation rather than a page.

If those four aren’t all true, a cart will sit there collecting no orders while costing you a monthly platform fee.

The middle option most B2B businesses want

Full catalogue, plus a request a quote flow. The buyer builds a list of what they need, submits it in one go, and your team responds with pricing.

It fits how B2B actually buys. It captures the enquiry with the specifics already attached. And it costs a fraction of a transactional store because there’s no payment gateway, no stock integration and no returns handling.

What each roughly costs to run

A catalogue site is hosting and occasional content updates. Small.

A store on a hosted platform is a monthly fee, transaction charges, payment gateway charges, and somebody’s time every single day. That last one is the line that gets left out of every quote and it’s the biggest.

How to decide in an afternoon

Count how many orders last year would have gone through a cart unchanged. No negotiation, no custom specification, no credit terms discussion, standard delivery.

If that number is small, build the catalogue properly and put the money into publishing your full range. You can add a cart later. Going the other way, having built a store nobody uses, is the expensive mistake.

Written by Sameer Gaikwad, founder of Buildgin. Thirty three years in electrical power systems across global MNCs, now applying the same condition monitoring habit to websites.