Open Icecat


Open Icecat is an Open Content project under the Open Content License in which a worldwide open catalogue is created for multilingual Product information management. Editors are participating manufacturers. The users of the product content are distributors, resellers, retailers, comparison websites or online shopping directories, the manufacturers themselves, and their enterprise resource planning systems, Product information management systems, or other systems.
In Open Icecat, a separate Open Catalog Interface is defined for the exchange of data between multilingual, multimedia product catalogs.
Open Icecat is as an open product catalog, not to be confused with commercial catalogs like offered by Icecat Inc, Gfk/Etilize and Cnet.

History

The project started in 2001. But, Open Icecat was formally launched 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, 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 70,000 online websites around the world.
In 2019, the number of participating manufacturers has increased to over 450, and now also includes toys brands such as Lego and Do It Yourself brands.

Open Catalog Interface

Over time, a number of standard catalog data exchange interfaces have been developed.
The most downloaded open source webshop - PHP & MySQL based osCommerce - provides an Icecat contribution. 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.
Icecat Integration is a plugin to connect Icecat to Magento, PrestaShop, WooCommerce, VirtueMart, Zen Cart. Sync names, descriptions and features with the above eCommerce platforms.
IceCART 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 is a plugin that connects Prestashop with Icecat, it can be adapted to any shopping cart to update the technical information directly from Icecat.
With the Open ICEcat Node.js package you can read the worldwide product information data from Icecat within your Node.js project.
See the overview of all add-ons and integrations is updated

Supported standards