Building Synova PDF Catalogue: line sheets and catalogs that take orders

Merchants need catalogs all the time: line sheets for wholesale buyers, handouts for trade shows, seasonal lookbooks, price lists for reps. In practice that means rebuilding a PDF in Canva or InDesign every time prices or products change, paying a designer for each refresh, or exporting a spreadsheet and calling it a line sheet. Once the PDF is sent there's no clean way to take an order from it, and within weeks it's out of date.

The product data already lives in Shopify. The problem was turning it into something that looks designed, matches the brand, prints properly and stays current, without the merchant learning design software.

We built Synova PDF Catalogue to close that gap. The brief was a sales-ready catalog in about 30 seconds, and a share link that could do more than deliver a file. It's a good example of the Shopify automation we do for clients: take a repetitive manual task, generate the output from live data, and keep it in sync. Wholesale line sheet automation was the use case we designed around first.

We kept the product PDF-first and focused on three document types that cover most needs. There's a multi-product catalog grouped by collection, with a cover and table of contents. There's a single-product brochure with gallery, specs and a variant table. And there's a dense line sheet with one row per variant (SKU, barcode, price, stock) and a blank Qty column for order-taking.

Design comes from eight templates and a reusable brand kit: logo, cover image, three brand colors, print-safe heading and body fonts, and contact details. Theming is contrast-aware, so a brand accent is only used where text stays readable. Merchants choose products by collection, tag, vendor or a hand-picked order. They control what shows: retail or hidden prices, compare-at prices, multiple currencies, per-product QR codes, clickable links and up to eight metafields as spec rows. Output supports A4 or US Letter, with bleed and crop marks for print shops.

The most important decision was to make the share link a sales channel. Links can be password-protected and set to expire. In shoppable mode, the link becomes a B2B order form, and submissions arrive as native Shopify draft orders tagged with the catalog and sales rep. Lead-capture mode asks for an email before download. Each staff member who opens the app gets their own catalogs, links and analytics. Product webhooks flag affected catalogs as outdated, and catalogs can regenerate daily or weekly. See Synova PDF Catalogue.

Synova PDF Catalogue today generates catalogs, brochures and line sheets in the background from live Shopify data. Every template and feature is on every plan, and plans differ only by volume. Share links track views and downloads, orders and leads are attributed to the rep who created the catalog, and leads export to CSV. Product descriptions are sanitized before rendering, rendering is network-restricted, and download links are short-lived and signed.

Two lessons stood out. First, a document is only useful while it stays true. A catalog generated once is a snapshot that starts going stale the moment a price changes, so the webhook-driven outdated flag and scheduled refresh mattered as much as the templates. Second, a document is worth more when it can start a transaction. When a line sheet link works as an order form that creates a draft order, a simple wholesale order doesn't need a separate B2B platform.

We also found that putting every feature on every plan made the product easier to explain and to support, because nobody has to work out which tier includes what. If you need documents, price lists or reports generated from your own data, our custom Shopify app work starts from the same ideas. Tell us what you need.