Building a Non-Ecommerce Product Catalog in Webflow: A Comprehensive Guide

When you're in the business of showcasing a wide variety of products without the need for e-commerce features, building a product catalog becomes a crucial step. A well-organized product catalog allows customers or clients to browse through your offerings with ease and find the information they need without unnecessary clutter. In this comprehensive guide, we'll walk you through the process of building a non-e-commerce product catalog in Webflow, a leading web design tool.

The Challenge: Building a Non-Ecommerce Product Catalog

As a Webflow user, you may have faced situations where you needed to design a product catalog for a client or for your own business that doesn't require e-commerce functionalities. Maybe it's a catalog for a medical instrument company with hundreds of different products, or perhaps a portfolio of your artwork. In such cases, you need a way to display your products in an organized manner, without the complexities of shopping carts, payment gateways, and shipping options.

The Solution: Using Webflow's CMS Collection

Webflow offers a feature called CMS collections that can be leveraged to create a product catalog without e-commerce. A CMS collection in Webflow is a content type that you can create, customize, and fill with unique content. In the context of a product catalog, each CMS item would represent a product, with custom fields to input data like product name, description, image, and any other relevant details.

Step 1: Creating a CMS Collection

To start, you need to create a new CMS collection. Name it something appropriate, like "Products." Then, start adding fields to your collection. These fields will hold the data for each product. For a basic product catalog, you might include fields for Product Name, Image, Description, and Category. You can customize these fields to suit the type of products you are showcasing.

Step 2: Adding Products to the Collection

Once you've set up the collection and defined the fields, you can start adding your products. Each product will be a new CMS item in your collection. If you have a large number of products, you can import them in bulk using a .csv file. However, keep in mind that multi-reference fields cannot currently be populated using a .csv upload.

Step 3: Designing the Product Catalog Page

With your product collection set up, you can start designing the layout for your product catalog page. You can use a CMS Collection List to display all your products and customize the design as you wish. Each product can be displayed in a card-like format, with the product image, name, and description. You can also add a link to a separate product detail page for each product.

Step 4: Customizing for Different Categories

If your products are categorized, you can customize your catalog to display products based on their categories. You can create different tabs or sections for each category, or even separate pages. This will require setting up additional CMS collections for each category and using multi-reference fields.

Important Consideration

While the above steps can help you create a basic non-e-commerce product catalog in Webflow, keep in mind that this is a simplified overview. Depending on your specific needs, you might need to customize your catalog further. For example, if you need the ability for visitors to add products to a cart for a quote, you can integrate with third-party tools like Foxy.io to achieve this functionality. Always consider your specific requirements and tailor your approach accordingly.

Conclusion

Building a non-e-commerce product catalog in Webflow can be a straightforward process with the right approach. By leveraging Webflow's CMS collections and customizing your design to suit your needs, you can create a visually appealing and easy-to-navigate product catalog that showcases your offerings effectively.

Remember, the key to a successful product catalog is organization and clear presentation of information. With Webflow, you have the tools to achieve just that. Happy designing!

Top Tip: Leverage Dynamic Embeds to Supercharge Your Product Catalog

Here's a less-known, yet powerful feature of Webflow: Dynamic Embeds. Imagine you want to show additional interactive content for each product, like a 3D model, a video tutorial, or dynamic charts for technical specifications. This is where Dynamic Embeds can be a game-changer.

Dynamic Embeds allow you to inject custom code or third-party widgets into your Webflow project and bind them to fields in your CMS Collections. This means you can add a field in your product CMS collection to hold a URL or an embed code, and then use that field to dynamically populate the embed code for each product.

For example, if you're showcasing furniture products on your catalog, you could add a 3D model viewer embed from a platform like Sketchfab. You add a field to your CMS collection to hold the Sketchfab model URL for each furniture item. Then, in your product template, you add a Dynamic Embed and link it to the Sketchfab URL field from your collection. Now, each product page will show the unique 3D model for that product, providing an interactive browsing experience for your customers.

Remember, Dynamic Embeds can be a bit advanced and require understanding of HTML and JavaScript. But the possibilities they open up are worth the learning curve. So, don't shy away from experimenting and pushing the boundaries of what you can achieve with your Webflow product catalog.