The effort of creating an electronic catalog essentially consists of the data preparation and the programming of the catalog.

Catalog programs provide functionality that allows the user to select and edit objects from a catalog. These programs can be developed individually or can be created on the basis of an existing program, such as the widely used Internet browsers by Microsoft and Netscape. In any case, some programming work must be done at this level, at least once. In most cases, programming is  done by specialists - not the publisher of the catalog.

Recurrent effort arises from the implementation and updating of the catalog data. The amount of this effort mainly depends on the technology in use. In the best case, this can be reduced to a minimum.