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• • December 3, 2009 at 5:33 pm #54108
    seaner7633

    Member

    I'm well underway on my company's 2010 catalog, and I was curious as to how other people handle the chore of updating prices throughout the catalog. My catalog has roughly about 1,300 or so item numbers, so it's no quick task for me.

    My boss emailed me a link to a plugin (or app) called AutoPrice. Does anyone use that? Or other plugins? Or scripts?

    -Sean

  • December 3, 2009 at 5:45 pm #54109
    David Blatner

    Keymaster

    There are a bazillion plug-ins, it seems, to handle creating catalogs and directories and other sorts of “database publishing” projects, including:

    • Auto Price from Meadows Software
    • InData from Em Software (or the more powerful InCatalog)
    • DataLinker from Teacup Software
    • EasyCatalog from 65Bit

    and others!

    In general, using a plug-in like one of these is the way to go when trying to automate the process.

  • December 3, 2009 at 6:47 pm #54111
    seaner7633

    Member

    Are any of these considered “the one”.

    I'd love to hear some accounts from fellow forum members that use any of these regularly.

    I'm curious as to how certain situations are handled:

    Such as layouts where some prices are at the end of a product's text block and some pricing is in tables.

    Or for items that have a large number of SKU's for just one actual item (like a pair of pants, where the item is just a pair of pants, but it has a SKU for each color and size variation). A spreadsheet of SKU's would list all of those, but in the catalog, you'd just list the base number.

    And etc… any stories involving a little or large challenge with pricing would be appreciated. We've grown comfortable with doing our catalog a certain way year after year, and I need to get us up to speed with better methods.

    Thanks.

    -Sean

  • December 4, 2009 at 12:08 pm #54139
    Colin Flashman

    Member

    check out this story from the main site:

    https://creativepro.com/fre…..g-math.php

  • December 4, 2009 at 2:14 pm #54140
    seaner7633

    Member

    Thanks Colin. I read that when it came out, and suggested a fix to an issue I found with it. My comments are still on that page. That script was perfect for a specific task I needed to do, which was create a version of the catalog with Canadian pricing. That was simple, in the sense that every price was being multiplied by the same number.

    What I'm asking about now, is involving the yearly price change, where any price can change by any amount. Finding the best and easiest way to automate the task of updating the prices in a catalog is the goal here.

  • December 4, 2009 at 5:14 pm #54146
    James Fritz

    Member

    I have direct experience using both AutoPrice and InData.

    Depending on what you are trying to acomplish, you will want to choose the appropriate plugin.

    I have used Autoprice when I am manually laying out an entire Catalog by hand and I only want to keep the prices in sync with a database.

    I have used InData if you are trying to automate the production of your catalog. This means that once you have everything setup before hand, you can just import data from the database and InData “builds” the entire catalog automatically. This will only work if your design if very rigid that there is very little variety. This works well on directorys or parts lists.

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