Find Online Shopping Catalogs

How This Works

Sometimes it's better to have the entire inventory list of products in front of you rather than navigate the merchant site for a product. This is back to the even older method of paging through a catalog book. At least on your desktop, the list can be on one page.

This idea was launched a few years back and had its own page. Then it merged with Speedyhunter as a subtopic page. Each catalog is the inventory of products the merchant offers. It starts in the form of a datafeed. Excel or Access receives the file. A script generates the page.

Before PHP, all catalogs were HTML files and accessed via links. Today, they are still HTML files but accessed via PHP by name. Select the catalog you want and click the Submit buton to see the catalog instantly. (Faster for faster computers.) You are warned if the catalog is huge.

Care is taken in the data processing step to ensure that the products are catagorized as appropriate for each merchant. You can skim down the lists by subcategory. Or you can use your browser search tool to find something you are looking for. This is a type of "deep search" where you have the list with you so your search is limited to that file. All-Battery.com in particular benefits from this method as the batteries have special technical names and very specific uses.

With the Things From Another World catalog, it's a quick way to assess overall inventory if you just want to know if it stocks a particular genre or series you are looking for.

The catalogs are static lists of products obtained in one day and naturally will not be the most current. Visit the merchant to get the latest deals and most current prices.

Please support this long, on-going project. I seek alternative methods of presenting merchant inventories. Some ideas are experimental. I hope to make more catalogs if this proves to be popular.