A good promotional item can be a critical part of a marketing effort, but sometimes finding one can be a real drag. The promotional industry is always looking for and finding innovative new ways to help a company get themselves noticed, which means more things to choose from every day. This means that the catalogs, online or offline, you need to browse through to find what you’re looking for get bigger and more complicated.

Often the best choice is to find a distributor or seller with a website and not trying to track down manufacturers directly. Generally the companies that create the promotional items you're looking for won't be selling to the general public, but through distributors that are equipped to complete a sale. This means that companies that sell promotional items to you are far more interested in giving you pricing and information than the manufacturers will! They can be so free with information it can actually feel a little like information overload sometimes. This is because, as you will discover, that there are many different things to decide on besides price. Some companies will offer a million products for you to choose from separated into a hundred different categories, which can seem worse than flipping through a catalog.

Easy to navigate sites are what you should be looking for, because a "promotional item" can mean literally millions of things. There is a lot of online retail out there, and a significant amount of those web sites are members of various networks that provide catalog information. What you will frequently find are online stores that are, more or less, an uninspired catalog of tons of items and a shopping cart to purchase them. Some online "stores" will even make it difficult to find phone numbers or customer service e-mail addresses!

Good promotional websites will have easy to understand categories that any layman can understand, and not wording that only people in the industry would understand. When you find what you're looking for or trying to pick from several different items, prices should be up front and the materials and sizes should be readily available. It should also be able to understand what you're looking at fairly quickly, and not have to try to decipher marketing lingo about the product you're considering.

Consider that a company that puts effort into making an easy to navigate website is also probably putting some time and effort into good customer service, which is most important aspect of your purchase. Your promotional product order can seem like a simple thing at first, but if you're planning to see your logo on a promotional product you need the customer service a good site will provide. There are all kinds of steps that happen before your order ships and potential mistakes that happen behind the scenes. Don't make the mistake of dealing with a second-rate company where you can expect less care taken during potential trouble spots.

Compared to a heavy paper catalog, the Internet is definitely the way to go. Not only will you find the promotional product you want more quickly, you’ll find it at the price you want and the shape or style you want.