How To Quickly Make A Print Catalog From A Simple Data File

Tim    Import / Export Data, Product Data    

Example of a print brochure made from a simple data file

Do you need a nice print brochure or catalog for your top-selling products?

Getting started is a lot easier than you think.

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Make a Print Catalog from Scratch Using Your Own Product Data — Part 4

Tim    Import / Export Data, Product Data     Excel, Export, Import, Your Product Data

Excel is useful for bulk editing of product data for print catalogs

This article is the fourth in a series that explains how to enter product data for making print catalogs. Catalog-on-Demand provides a tool for this purpose. It is called Private Data Editor (PDE).

Please read Part 1, Part 2, and Part 3 first.

This article is about using Excel for bulk editing of your product data. It is very convenient to use Excel in conjunction with PDE for managing hundreds or thousands of rows of product data. You can make minor edits in PDE. When you have a lot of products to edit, then it is easiest to: (a) use PDE to export the products to Excel; (b) edit them in Excel; and (c) use PDE to import back from Excel. We have customers managing thousands of products in this way. It is also a fast way to add new products. This is especially true when you are copying data over from other spreadsheets or other sources. read more

Using Variants in Your Google Product Feed Will Improve Your Print Catalogs

Tim    Google Products Feed, Import / Export Data, Product Data     Google Data Feed

Variants in your Google data feed make better print catalogs

Uploading your product data to Google Product Search is a terrific (and free!) way to increase exposure to your eCommerce site. And now that same data feed that you provide to Google can be used to make print catalogs.

However, there is one problem that we are seeing frequently — each size and color is listed as a separate product. This is not correct. Instead, each color and size should be listed as a separate variant of a product.

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Import and Export Using Catalog-on-Demand Data Files

Tim    Import / Export Data, Product Data     Excel, Export, Import, Your Product Data

The simplest and fastest way for most businesses to create print catalogs using Catalog-on-Demand is to pull the data from their storefront or e-commerce database. If your provider is not doing so already, we encourage you to contact them and request that they provide a compatible data export. Depending on the functionality of the e-commerce tool and its underlying database, making the data available as a Google data feed — which they are probably already doing — might be entirely sufficient.

Even so, we find that customers often ask us for the Catalog-on-Demand Data File format. Sometimes this is because a business wants to be able to pull from a proprietary data source. Another reason is that the Catalog-on-Demand Data File format is richer than many other formats. It allows customers to take advantage of more Catalog-on-Demand features.

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Loading Product Data for Print Catalogs — The “Traditional” Way

Tim    Import / Export Data, Product Data     Your Product Data

Longtime users of Catalog-on-Demand know that we didn’t start with the idea of making print catalogs from e-commerce systems. That is a concept that came along fairly recently. Rather, most of our past customers have managed their data using a blend of our content editing tools and imports from other systems.

Looking into the future, we expect that most users will want to make their print catalogs from product data that already exists in their e-commerce storefronts. That makes a lot of sense —  why maintain it in two places? But that is not a solution that works for everyone.

We are hearing from some of you that the product information you want to use for print catalogs does not exist in your e-commerce systems. Or maybe it is structured in a way that limits its usefulness.

For you, we have a great solution. We call it “Private Data Editor”, or PDE for short. With PDE, you can:

• Manually add, edit, and delete product information
• Manage your hierarchy
• Import and export your product data into Excel, delimited text, or XML

Most people use PDE when they need to tweak only a few products. They use PDE’s import/export features when they have to edit a lot of products.

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Auto-Update Your Print Catalogs with Google Data Feed

Tim    Auto Update — Always Fresh™, Google Products Feed, Import / Export Data     Google Data Feed, Import

You already know that Catalog-on-Demand can make catalogs from your Google data feed in a matter of minutes (click here if this is new to you).

But how do you keep it up-to-date? You’d like to post your PDFs on your site for customers to download. But that does not make sense if the PDFs will be outdated as soon as you start changing the product data. You want your PDF to be in sync with the content in your e-store.

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