"Request to Manufacturers - Printable Product Lists Please" Topic

This is a request to many miniatures manufacturers, to provide a listing of your products that is printable, and that has product numbers, prices, and descriptions of the items you sell, but that doesn't include photos of them interspersed on the catalog listing page(s).

I, and I suspect many others, would like to be able to print your offerings out, for future reference, in order to come up with a purchasing plan, for when funds become available, and/or to ensure we've got everything we need.

Having such a listing makes this a lot easier, and is less time consuming than having to write it all down, or to waste printer ink in printing numerous pages of photos that we may not need.

I suspect having such a listing available might actually help to boost sales, and at the very least will engender a lot of goodwill from your customers.

Some companies already provide these, and if you are one of them, I thank you.

I'd like to see a lot of other companies do the same, so hope you will consider my humble request.

Appeals for lists should, of course, be made by handwritten letter, enclosing an SSAE or international reply coupon.

Seriously, assuming you have a notes/notepad or equivalent program on your computer, simply copy and paste details of each code you want from a manufacturer's website to that and strip out any pictures that come across in the copy and paste.

The world of lists must have died as a serious commercial option for orders, apart from some traders who live in the Dark Ages, at least five years ago. Still, it makes a change from requests for photographs of each item and full descrptions…

i would like to but it would take at least 2 weeks to do that and things like new models and production of models for mail order would suffer, sadly.

Some manufacturers have a PDF file that lists their products and this is often good enough to cut and paste from. A bit of reformatting in Excel and you have your planning list.

Having to create one by copying an online catalogue page formatted by some demon web designer is often close to impossible. I have given up at times as I feel myself losing the will to live.

I might also add that those manufacturers who allow web designers to use 'blood' coloured text on a purple screen backdrop should be shot, slowly !!!

So, I understand this is precisely what you DO NOT want? PDF link

Curious indeed. I had been keeping since a start the kind of listing you request (a spreadsheet PDF printing), but finally thought it better to show a more thoroughly worked out, illustrated listing --in the believe users would greet being spared browsing across my website categories and sub-categories.

It never came to my mind that individual users might like to print it, although I admittedly pretended this new illustrated version to be printable by retailers/distributors, for gaming shows/events.

So, would you believe it good to have a simpler, non-illustrated catalogue version available too?

i personally have great contempt for IT…Phones, tablets and computers are the opposite of culture and education…wargame is supposed to be a cultural hobby …so please back to paper…everything should be printable

I expect that even very modest IT-handlers (like me ;-)) are able to make their list from the websites of various manufacturers. Since most of them are activities of one person with also a dayjob, I would not mind to do a little extra work to make my own list. But I surely want to be able to SEE the figures before I buy them. That does not need to be as goodlooking as the pdf-file of Minairons (;-)) but no illustrations at all of several ranges means – at least for me – not buying those figures.

I agree that I need to see the figures also. I got caught a few times purchasing figures without seeing them and they ended up being not what I had expected. So now unless I see what they look like before I buy them then there is a no sale.

The Minairons PDF catalog is very well executed; all the necessary information plus illustration.

We do have complete catalogs with everything listed for each of our ranges without pictures. Just ask and we will mail one to you. However, they are 40mm figures. miniatureservicecenter.com

Some website software will let you do this: create a downloadable product list. Whether any web stores use these shopping carts I don't know.

Part of the challenge is that it is often not a "one and done" project. Listings, prices etc. are constantly updating. So in addition to a new product, now you not only have to add it to the web store but edit it in to the product listing, and republish that document.

I routinely print such listings for customers, especially at conventions or in-store.

Have you tried emailing and just asking manufacturers to send you such a list in, say, a simple Excel format?

I may be wrong but manufacturers having to generate pdfs of their products can only add to their overheads and reduces their time for producing new figures and fulfilling orders.

The internet has been a boon to wargaming for me. I don't have to have huge piles of paper catalogues hanging around that are soon out of date

All of my army lists are on spreadsheets

I wargame the 19th Century – I don't want to live in it

The 19th Century? I shudder,sir-- shudder, I say!

I have sharpened my quills, refreshed my inkpot,and laid in a sheaf of new vellum. I shall now pen a series of strong protests!

Just allow me to adjust my periwig. . .

Did any of you actually read WHY the OP wants it kept simple ? It seems that quite a few didn't.

I an sure that most manufacturers have a basic list of their ranges – used for stock taking, casting lists etc. If I understand the OP correctly, it is that type of list he wants made available.

He didn't suggest removing pictures from websites or reverting to 1970's methodology.

Reap the OP?!?

What is this, 1982?

Copying and pasting works sometimes, but not others, due to ALL the embedded stuff, like shopping cart links, photos, etc..

It turns into a nightmare, AND making lists by hand can be very time-consuming.

Ink costs more than gold, by weight, so……..

There is no need to delete photos on websites, but I don't want/need them on a MS Word, or Excel listing.

We have our full catalogue available as a pdf on our Forum, updated every few months. There's no images in it, purely text, so should be just what you're looking for.

The only bad news is that I've not uploaded the latest one to our new website so the old hyperlinks don't work at the moment! Another job for the To-Do list…!

I have a PDF list on my site as well as I still get occasional requests by post for it and it is the list I use for shows

Mike

Good to hear.

PDFs are fine, and appreciated too, especially if they don't have lots of photos, black or colored borders/backgrounds, etc., etc..

I'm with Mako on this, I was just trying to print off a company's product line from their website and in the end my choices were to print off about one item per printed page (plus about four pages of header/footer/sidebar material) or three items per page at 2 point font.

Just a list is sometimes all we need, particularly for large ranges. Black Hat's pdf is perfect, I'm using it for my WSS skirmish project.