Why pay for product data when great, free product data is already available? Moreover, great free software solutions are available to integrate and manage your free product data.
The largest free product data set is undoubtedly Open Icecat. Open Icecat has been, since 2005, an Open Content project in which a worldwide open catalogue is created for multilingual Product Information Management (PIM). Editors are working on behalf of the 100s of participating mainstream manufacturers. They produce or standardize the millions of product datasheets that cover the products of these manufacturers. Over 70 languages are supported.
The business users of the product data are distributors, resellers, retailers, comparison websites, the manufacturers themselves, and their enterprise resource planning systems, PIM systems, or other apps. Open Icecat’s Catalog Interface is a set of APIs for the exchange of data between multilingual, multimedia product catalogs.
Open Icecat is a great alternative to paid dataset providers like 1WorldSync/Cnet or GfK/Etilize. Open Icecat is not limited with regard to the categories supported.
Icecat offers free product data and a free product data delivery platform for retailers and distributors: Icecat Vendor Central. Via this no-code cloud app, brand suppliers can add their product information to this multilingual Icecat PIM directly via templates for bulk upload or fully automated via the associated push API.
In this Icecat PIM, the brand’s product content is standardized and then automatically ingested by selected partners. Big retailers and distributors use Vendor Central and encourage their brand suppliers to use Icecat Vendor Central as well.
What is free product data without a free PIM—a software solution to enrich or reformat the product data? One of the best open-source PIMs at the moment is Pimcore, which is more of a true open-source solution than Akeneo PIM. Pimcore offers easy ways to build web pages. It supports various elements for media, such as videos, PDFs, documents, images, hotspot images, and 360 images. Like WordPress, the pages can be built using a what-you-see-is-what-you-get (WYSIWYG) approach. It provides an edit mode where sections can be matched with assets for final display. As a result, building templates for displaying product pages and mostly static content is quite easy.
To import the product data, you will need an add-on or interface. Icecat has a large number of these add-ons to popular platforms. For Pimcore also the Open Icecat add-on is also published as open source software. So, it’s completely free as well.
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