Thank you for being a valued part of the CNET community. As of December 1, 2020, the forums are in read-only format. In early 2021, CNET Forums will no longer be available. We are grateful for the participation and advice you have provided to one another over the years.

Thanks,

CNET Support

General discussion

Searching for eCommerce PDf catalog creator - web based.

Jan 30, 2009 12:01AM PST

Hi -

I have been searching for software that will pull all items (images, text, and price) directly from the an eCommerce site and input them into a PDF in a catalog format . I have been able to find several programs that can create a PDF of an entire website, and several catalog creator programs, but all information needs to be inputted into the program itself. I'm looking for this program to be able to pull items from a web address in real time so as items are added and deleted, the program will create real time PDFs.

Anyone know about anything like this?

Discussion is locked

- Collapse -
You, a programmer and a specification.
Jan 30, 2009 12:10AM PST

Could create such software for a price. There is no such software because the market so far is "the one." You must know I encounter people that think every software has been written and is just waiting to be found but that's not true yet. You found the PDF generators but not something to go from your eComm site to some CMS (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Content_management_system )

Figure that if you are very lucky, you might find a programmer that will tackle this job along with that suitcase of cash.
Bob

- Collapse -
Re: catalog creator
Jan 30, 2009 6:32AM PST

If it's your own website, why not take the original content as input?

If it's another website, yes, then you will have to pay for such a program. But it might even be illegal for copyright reasons.

Kees

- Collapse -
also looking for web-based ecommerce pdf catalog creator
Feb 5, 2009 7:44AM PST

Hi, I'm in the same boat as SwervePoint...I'm looking for a way to pull images, descriptions and prices from an ecommerce site and create an electronic catalog. It's for my company's website so it's legit. Here's what/why I'm trying to accomplish...

My company sells over 7,000 skus on our ecommerce site which regularly get updated, deleted and new products added. While we are online driven, some of our customers still would like a printed catalog. In today's world, it's not a justifiable marketing expense to mass produce print catalogs that need to be stored and will be outdated the minute we change a price or add a new product. And considering how many products there are, to manually layout an entire catalog and update as needed is horribly time consuming. My hopes are to find a solution to pull all the current info from the database, auto-populate a template and create a pdf catalog that can then be printed one-off whenever a customer requests a catalog. Then everything is current up-to-the minute and we only produce as many as we need. It's a complete on-demand solution.

I found what I thought I was looking for at http://www.hanmingsoft.com/products/catalog2pdf/index.html
but I can't use the trial to see if it's what I need because I'm a Mac user and can't run the .exe file.

And as far as custom building an app, we're not opposed to spending some money on a solution. But if it were custom built -it would cost a suitcase of money- and we'd want to be able to package it and market the product to all the other ecommerce companies out there that are probably running into a similar problem.

Any other solutions out there? Any insight is much appreciated. Thanks.

- Collapse -
What a strange company you work for.
Feb 5, 2009 4:24PM PST

They can't even buy a $50 old Windows PC from eBay to try this program you found. And they don't know how to run Windows on a Mac either (hint: bootcamp).

I would start looking for another job immediately. I suspect they will soon run out of money to pay your salary.

Kees

- Collapse -
Searching for eCommerce PDf catalog creator - web based
Jun 30, 2009 10:08PM PDT

I know one program that creates catalogs of products and services. It's called Product Catalog Builder on http://www.productcatalogbuilder.com/. You can easily create entry for each product such as description, photos, price, additional details...And you can export catalogs not only in PDF format but in HTML too.