This paper presents results from a European standardization project on electronic product catalogs and their application in business-to-business e-commerce. The CEN/ISSS Workshop eCAT aims at formulating a strategy for establishing a harmonized methodology for multilingual e-catalogues, and for implementing this methodology in a future full scale project. As part of this workshop, we will describe basic problems and standardization issues, followed by a detailed analysis of existing standards and standardization initiatives. This will help to reconstruct the state-of-the-art in e-catalog standardization, to identify problems and obstacles that hinder a broader acceptance and diffusion of standards, and finally, to argue on more suitable, harmonized standards.