How to copy a supplier's product listing from their website?

I am looking at starting a new business but before I can do that I need to copy the products listing info from the website into my own. Does anyone have any ideas of how to do that?

Hi xnarfx,

I'm sorry but I don't quite understand why you need to copy your supplier's website to yours.

Just to clarify are you asking about copying products descriptions/images from the supplier's site to yours? Please explain or clarify so we can help you out accordingly.

Tall to you soon!

i would also be wondering why you would bneed to copy their website, if its only the items you want to copy, I just use copy and paste.

I believe he wants to copy the inventory and post it on his own site which is not uncommon. Some suppliers offer a download of inventory, pictures, descriptions and prices in a csv file which is used by websites to upload inventory files. The only problem is that each csv file is specific for each website so it must be changed to comply with the site that you wish to upload on. For instance, Bonanza has their own format, they say just upload your csv file but it is not that easy, you must format your file to their format which involves renaming certain columns and deleting certain columns from the file you wish to uplaod. I did find a place that will do this for you for $29.95 per file but I do not have the name in front of me. I believe it can be found on Traffic Travis website. Since there is a service offering to do this I would think there is software available if one will do the research.
If I am wrong about this feel free to correct me.

I am looking to start a new business, but before I can do that I need to copy there website into my own. Does anyone have any ideas of how to do that?

Hey there. I, like other here, would like to help but I'm not completely clear on what you'd like to copy.

Since others have covered how to copy the whole thing (in terms of listings) perhaps I can add some value with this:

If you wish to copy particular elements of a website, you can (with a good eye and maybe ctrl+f) right-click the site and hit "view page source"

From there, you can scroll through the HTML of that page and find the elements you'd like to have on your own website. You can then add those scripts to your own code and make them your own.

Cheers,
-Adrian

I tried the same thing when I started out, not 100% sure but I don't think it can be done.

Let me guess, your suppliers website has buy now buttons, retail prices, etc. and you want to copy and paste the whole thing all at one time.

My advice is get a web design program and get to work designing your own site, it will take a while, but if it was easy everyone would be successful sellers.

Ok, to clarify I am looking for where to gain knowledge of how to strip a suppliers products.

So for example one supplier has nearly 100k items, I want to pull product images, description, sizes, colors, etc... Organize the data while it is being pulled, then loop all that data back into my companies website by using an uploading program of some sort. I'm not a huge tech buff, so excuse my non-precise tech language, but that is essentially what I want to do.

Do I need to clarify more?

You will need to get in touch with the supplier so you they can assist you directly. Plus you need to inform the supplier that you will be copying their product database to your site.

All the best!

Just to add, in Firefox you can select a portion of the website and choose "View Selection Source". It pops up a window with the actual HTML tags of the selected portion already selected for you for easy cut and paste.

Very interesting, do you know of any video tutorials doing this? I'm not the tech end of the business, but wouldn't that maybe conflict with your theme, or could you just only grab the certain info you need knowing where you are looking and being versed in HTML... Etc... ?

1. Drag select(and highlight) a portion of the item description. Like a bulleted list, or a table

2. Right Click

3. Choose "View Selected Source"

4. In the window that pops up, some text will already be highlighted. Simply copy/paste that into an ebay auction you are starting, making sure the editor window is set to HTML. (like where your description would go for an item).

It will probably require a bit of tweaking, but after a time or two you'll find it very quick for manual auctions.

Interesting and thank you for that walk through.

My plan isn't eBay, it's an actual website containing a minimum goal of 25k products to start, and then to grow from there with goals of 50k and 100k +

I'll run this by my tech guy.

1. Drag select(and highlight) a portion of the item description. Like a bulleted list, or a table

2. Right Click

3. Choose "View Selected Source"

4. In the window that pops up, some text will already be highlighted. Simply copy/paste that into an ebay auction you are starting, making sure the editor window is set to HTML. (like where your description would go for an item).

It will probably require a bit of tweaking, but after a time or two you'll find it very quick for manual auctions.

Don't forget though that with this technique you have to redirect the images because they will block access to them at some point and you want to change up some of the code so it's not plagiarism.