PriceFrame vs Catalog Maker
If you're trying to turn your Shopify products into a shareable PDF catalogue or wholesale price list, two names come up regularly: PriceFrame and Catalog Maker. Both pull from your Shopify data — but they serve different use cases, and understanding the difference will save you installing both.
What PriceFrame does
PriceFrame is built for wholesale and B2B merchants who need to send product catalogues and price lists to buyers, stockists, and retailers. It generates clean, print-ready PDFs from your Shopify product data — images, descriptions, SKUs, and pricing — formatted as a professional wholesale document. The focus is on the buyer relationship: making something you'd confidently put in front of a retail buyer without further formatting.
What Catalog Maker does
Catalog Maker (typically referring to apps like Simple Catalog or similar tools in the App Store) tends to offer more template variety and visual customisation. Some versions are geared more toward consumer-facing catalogues than wholesale price sheets — decorative layouts, cover pages, and design options take priority over the data-dense format trade buyers expect.
Side by side
| Feature | PriceFrame | Catalog Maker |
|---|---|---|
| Pulls from Shopify products | Yes | Yes |
| PDF export | Yes | Yes |
| Wholesale price formatting | Purpose-built | Varies — often consumer-focused |
| B2B line sheet format | Yes | Limited |
| CSV export for buyers | Yes | Varies |
| Automatic sync with Shopify prices | Yes | Varies |
| Design customisation | Clean, branded | More template options |
The wholesale vs consumer distinction
Trade buyers don't need a beautiful full-bleed layout — they need SKUs, descriptions, minimum order quantities, and pricing in a format they can scan and act on quickly. A catalogue built for consumer browsing has different priorities than one built for a wholesale buyer making purchasing decisions. PriceFrame is built around the trade buyer format. If your audience is stockists and retailers, that matters.
When Catalog Maker might be the right call
If your primary output is a consumer-facing look-book or a branded marketing piece rather than a functional trade document — and you want more visual template options — some Catalog Maker variants suit that better. It depends on what your document needs to do when it lands with the recipient.
The price list currency question
One practical difference: if you need separate retail and wholesale pricing tiers in the same document, or you need to strip pricing from a consumer version, PriceFrame handles those cases directly. Generic catalogue tools typically output whatever's in Shopify without the layering.