Why we are building Catlog 🛍️

Buying and selling have always been an essential part of human culture, it is how we get the things we need to survive.

Today with the popularity of the internet (and the restrictions COVID19 brought) more and more businesses are moving online, predominantly to social media (which ironically is not a place, but where most people live today).

This leads to a problem, “How do sellers easily show all the items they sell”? With physical stores, you could just walk in, look through the shelves and see all the options available. But with social commerce, it’s a big mess. Usually, sellers post items on their Instagram or Twitter, but this has a couple of obvious problems:

1. Sellers have to share other contents (which aren’t product items) on their pages, and this makes it difficult for buyers to easily scan through.
2. Even after items have been sold out, they still remain on the pages, which once again — you guessed it.

Personally, my experience buying things online from vendors goes like this, I'm looking for a new pair of sneakers → I spend some minutes searching for vendors close to me selling sneakers → I find one and send them a link to one of their posts of an item on WhatsApp → the vendor tells me the sneakers I want is unavailable and then proceeds to send me tons of other images to show me what's available → I finally settle for an option and make my purchase.

We believe the process could be smoother and that's why we decided to build Catlog.

So what is Catlog?

Simply put: Catlog is a way for sellers to create a simple list of all the products they sell and get a link they can share anywhere.

You can think of Catlog as Linktree for products for vendors who sell on social media.

Currently, Catlog helps sellers achieve 3 things:

1. Make more sales
   Catlog helps sellers make more sales because now everyone can see all the items they sell, which would prevent customers from purchasing elsewhere because they didn’t know they sold those items
2. Be more efficient
   With Catlog sellers can focus more on sales as opposed to answering tons of product inquiry questions from customers who might not end up buying because everyone can easily see everything they sell
3. Be more visible
   With our advanced search engine optimizations, if sellers correctly filled in their store details, their store would show up when customers search google for related keywords eg: shoe sellers in Abuja

Over the last couple of months our team has been working really hard to build something that really works and testing with a few sellers, and today we’re glad to announce that Catlog is live in private beta.

We’re still private because we still want to test things more and there are still a couple of essential parts needed for us to launch to the general public.

If you’re interested in using Catlog then head over to https://catlog.shop and if we think your business is a good fit to test with, we’ll let you in.

Checkout some sellers already using catlog:

1. Bernadines cafe & bistro: https://catlog.shop/eatbernadines
2. Sole mates NG: https://catlog.shop/solematesng
3. Pancake boss: https://catlog.shop/pancake-boss

What’s next?

For us, this is just the start as there's a ton of cool stuff we plan to build and launch in the next couple of months.

• Sales automation on WhatsApp with chatbots
• Advanced analytics for sellers
• Catlog Explore
• Dual posting from catlog to Instagram & Instagram to catlog
• Product & cart invoices
• Vendors' mobile app launch
• And a good number of other things.

Even with all these, we are focused on keeping Catlog as simple & easy to use as it is today — because this is our core — Ease!

Asides from all these, one thing we’re really excited about is how easy it is to scale this product.

We dream of Catlog as a product for sellers all over the world and not just for Nigerians or Africans and in Q1 2022 we’ll be launching to Ghana 🇬🇭 and south Africa 🇿🇦.

So watch out for Catlog!