Traditional part/component suppliers mainly use paper-based product catalogs and advertisements to promote their products, and buyers make their purchase decisions based on these paper product catalogs. With the application of information technology to manufacturing industries, the old dated paper product catalogs become less and less competitive. It becomes an urgent need for the part/component suppliers to provide timely updated 3D digital product catalogs with 3D CAD models to their customers. The benefits of the 3D digital product catalogs to the suppliers include:
       1. Timely update of the product catalogs, and quickly inform their customers on the updates.
       2. Reaching more (potential) customers in a more timely fashion using internet.
       3. Increasing customer loyalty. More than 80% of design engineers will buy their physical products after they used 3D digital models from their part/component suppliers in their designers.

Since users can real-time explore and preview the 3D digital product catalogs online, it has the following advantages:
       1. Explorations of products online; timely removing out-of-date product catalogs; creating database for suppliers, parts and components. Designers from buyer-side can online explore, search, download, utilize, and purchase products digitally.

2. Online community can promote the design skills by technological data exchange and model updating during the design process in the forms of chatting and collaborative design.

3. Capable of simultaneous supporting large number of online visits, answering users’ requests, and dealing with their corresponding transactions. Our server can automatically balance the online traffics and server loads, allocate resources correspondingly.

4. Capable of solving the security considerations and instability of network communications using proxy server, in case companies don’t allow directly accessing outside network due to security reasons.

3D product catalog is aiming at improving product design efficiency and providing better stages for part suppliers to showcase their products.