Open Icecat

Open Icecat is an Open Content project under the Open Content License in which a worldwide open catalogue is created for product information. Editors are participating manufacturers. The users of the product content are distributors, resellers, retailers, comparison websites or online shopping directories, enterprise resource planning systems or the manufacturers themselves.

Open Icecat is as an open catalog, not to be confused with commercial catalogs like offered by Icecat Inc (Full Icecat), Gfk/Etilize and Cnet.

History

Open Icecat began formally in December 2005 with 20 participating IT manufacturers. Among the earliest contributors are Hewlett-Packard, Toshiba, IBM and Lenovo. As of March 2007, this number has grown to more than 90 manufacturers, including participants from consumer electronics like Sony, Philips and Kodak, and the telecom industry.

In January 2011, Open Icecat grew to some 250 manufacturers and supported 33 languages. Including English (UK & US), Russian, Spanish, Finnish, Chinese, Japanese, Portuguese, German, Romanian, French, Dutch and many others. By then, the Open Catalogue counted 11.800 e-business partners. Catalogues cover IT, CE, Telecom and Office. In November 2014, Open Icecat launched its LIVE version, a real-time JavaScript service, providing real-time inserts in client websites, as an alternative to URL format. The same year Open Icecat integrated new sectors in its catalogue such as Lighting and Beauty, L'Oréal Netherlands being one of the almost 300 sponsoring manufacturers. Open Icecat catalogue is used by over 46000 online websites around the world.

Integrations

The most downloaded open source webshop - PHP & MySQL based osCommerce - provides an Icecat contribution.[1] Also with regard to other open source webshops, like Batavi, PrestaShop, Zen Cart and Magento, integration efforts are noted. Further, a number of integrations are made by proprietary ASP solution providers like Stock in the channel, Emini, Web2Biz, MyCOP/adfontes, QuoteWerks, bInTime, RightClick, Wicecat,[2] xtCommerce and Roy Duineveld.[3]

IceCART[4] is a freeware plugin to connect Zencart to Icecat. With this tool you can easily associate the Icecat description to your Zencart products in the shop.

Wicecat[2] is a plugging that connects Prestashop with Icecat, it can be adapted to any shopping cart to update the technical information directly from Icecat.

Supported standards

References

  1. ↑ "osCommerce Community Add-Ons". Oscommerce.com. Retrieved 2013-06-24.
  2. 1 2 "Wicecat". Wasato.net. Retrieved 2013-06-24.
  3. ↑ "Icecat XML Processing with PHP". Roy Duineveld.
  4. ↑ Archived November 9, 2009, at the Wayback Machine.
This article is issued from Wikipedia - version of the 11/18/2016. The text is available under the Creative Commons Attribution/Share Alike but additional terms may apply for the media files.