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Offline Product Catalogue

BikerSco

BikerSco

Lurker
Hi,

I'm looking for an app that we can install on our sales reps tablets. We will be buying new tablets shortly and I need to be able to have our company catalogue on the device that will show the product description and some pictures that can be expanded to full screen. Its not going to be an ecommerce solution just a catalogue that the reps can use to show our products to the customers when they are in the customers premises.

The reps wont always have internet access where they are so it will need to be an offline catalogue that they can access from anywhere.

Does anyone have any ideas if there is a solution to this out there? I found this app which looks perfect for our needs but it is an IOS app and isnt available for android. iCat - The Best Offline iPad Catalog We really dont want to have to go out and buy ipad's for all our reps as it very cost prohibitive and also I would prefer to stick to android devices.

I thought about going down the route of building a small simple website and storing the files on the device but i'm sure there must be a better way than that as I would have to manually update all the phones html/pictures when the catalogue is updated.

I also looked at using phoneGap but it looks very complicated and I really don't have the time to go and learn this software.

I also thought about using a pdf catalogue or an epub but again the updating it would be a bit of a pain.

Any help would be very much appreciated.

D-A
 
Hi D-A.. This is also something that we have been exploring as well, so I will follow along to see what suggestions come through!
We have a mixture of devices in the field, between iPhone and ipad, as well as blackberries, android tablets, android phones and laptops...

Up to about a year ago, we had to create our catalog in excel and email it every time it got updated, which is both cumbersome and space restrictive. Recently our company went to sales force . com for our online reporting and sales reps info. We started posting a PDF version there, and anytime there was an update our reps get a notification. This could actually be done via Box or another cloud storage program just as easily... But the reason we went to PDF is that we also created interactive forms as part of the catalog portfolio as well. Functional on any device with Adobes mobile reader. Basically if the rep wanted to have the customers contact info sent to us... Click submit on a form and done. Or if they ended up taking an order on the spot.. Again just a submit button. We can also include full size/HD res pictures in the PDF, and all of the specific dimensions, charts, etc. Basically just printed our excel version to PDF and uploaded.

I am looking forward to seeing if there are other suggestions!
 
That sounds good Ryan, how did you develop the the interactive parts to the PDF? I had no idea that PDF's could work like that. I always assumed they were static documents.

I'll need to have a look in to that. May work in the interim until I find something else that works. It's a shame the iCat software isn't for android as it looks perfect for us.

I'm just starting looking in to this at the moment so i'll update you with any other info I find out.

Thanks for the reply mate :)
 
We used Adobe Acrobat to create the presentations. (currently using acrobat9) but from Acrobat, there is a forms menu... Imported the excel document and edited the form. You can add buttons, links, images, fill in form spots etc. For us the big thing was the "presentation" so since the excel version was already functional... We used Adobe to simply display plus added the interactive form and buttons and links.. We even have links in the table of contents to certain pages or even to pages that aren't normally visible.

The other one that was recommended to us was Filemaker..

Good luck! And keep us updated.
 
ah I see, how does acrobat do with displaying images? Can you click them and get them to open up larger?

Seems like this may be an option for us. We don't have actually have a digital product catalogue at the moment as we have over 10,000 products in our db. We do have an x-cart website which has got all the information for about 1000 of our popular retail products and I am aware of a mod that can export the products to a pdf catalogue. This may be a way of getting the products out of the store in to a format that I can use without having to re-enter all the data for the products manually.

Has anyone used any android web servers? I was thinking maybe a local webserver running on the tablet that I could write a bit of php that checks for a network connection and updates the db or even a button to update it manually.

Edit: Found this app with a quick search on Google, may be able to setup a website that runs on the Reps tablet locally and offline which will give me all the features of html, php and even a MySQL db on the tablet.

https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=com.andi.serverweb&hl=en
 
maggiedon your link doesn't seem to work for me and its a bit odd you have never posted anything on this forum before and the first thing you do is post a link to which i'm going to guess is a paid for piece of software.

It's shouting affiliate link to me but I may be completely wrong.

I have tried to access the domain for that site and it just times out. Maybe you can give me a jist of what it does.

Thanks
 
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