I used to build ecommerce presences, many of which were for old catalogue merchants making the jump to ecommerce. It was eye-opening. Even in the heyday of cat

I used to build ecommerce presences, many of which were for old catalogue merchants making the jump to ecommerce. It was eye-opening. Even in the heyday of catalogue shopping, which this paper is from the tail end of in the early noughts, conversion rates were abysmal - and they were entirely acceptant of that, and didn’t believe it could be improved upon. Don’t even get me started on print and distribution costs. You’re looking at double digit CPAs on sales. Margins had to make up for it, which usually meant cutting everything else to the bone and really, really pushing finance options. An interesting part of this was that when they went online they often really, really, really wanted to replicate the catalogue experience on their websites - page flipping, etc. - took a lot of dissuasion, and in one case where they were particularly obstinate, we went ahead with their desires, with the proviso that they would allow us to build a competing site on more traditional ecommerce lines at no additional cost, with the proviso that we got a cut of sales. They dropped their catalogues entirely a year into the experiment. Catalogues suck.