How to build a catalogue website without prices

When prices change too often to print

I built the Arun Silver catalogue around product inquiries rather than fixed prices. If you deal in precious metals, raw materials or commodities, your expenses are tied to a daily market rate. For Arun Silver, pricing follows the day's silver rate and buyers ask for a quote. Sterling is priced against the day’s metal rate. In this catalogue, buyers collect SKUs and quantities in an inquiry list. I use the available specifications to help buyers identify what they want to ask about. The solution is to remove the price tag entirely and build a system designed for wholesale inquiries.

Give every product a page with its specification

When you remove the price, the specification becomes the most important part of the listing. You must give every product a page with its specification clearly listed. For the Arun Silver catalogue, every single design has its own dedicated page. Each page displays a SKU and its available specifications. The photos are watermarked to protect the designs, and buyers can open a lightbox to see the details up close. I keep quoting separate from the listing because pricing follows the day's silver rate. The site now has 439 product pages across ten collections, and buyers can search by SKU, collection or tag to find exactly what they need.

An inquiry list instead of a cart

A traditional e-commerce shopping cart expects a fixed price at checkout. When you do not have fixed prices, you need a different mechanism to capture the buyer’s interest. The best approach is to build an inquiry list instead of a cart. On the Arun Silver website, buyers browse the catalogue and add items to their list just like they would add them to a cart, but no payment is requested. The list is stored locally in the buyer’s browser, meaning there is no login required and no account to create. The buyer simply collects the SKUs and quantities they are interested in. This list is then used to generate a structured request that the supplier can easily process at the current day’s rate.

Keep quoting separate from the catalogue

I keep the product pages focused on the designs and their available specifications. Buyers ask for a quote based on the day's silver rate. The earlier silver-rate widget has been removed from the catalogue.

Serve both languages on the same URLs

I built the Arun Silver interface in English and Hindi. A better, cleaner way is to serve both languages on the same URLs. The whole interface of the catalogue switches between English and Hindi from a single translation table. The URLs remain exactly the same whether the user is reading in English or Hindi. This keeps the catalogue on the same URLs in both languages. It also keeps maintenance simpler for the business owner.

Make the product pages crawlable

A large catalogue is a huge asset for search engine visibility, but only if the search engines can actually read it. You must make the product pages crawlable. After the Arun Silver launch, a check found that the catalogue page looked complete to a human visitor but was almost completely empty to a crawler. This happened because the products only appeared after the client-side JavaScript ran. I fixed this by rendering the full product grid as real HTML before any script executes. Product pages carry Product structured data alongside their available specifications. Each product page also includes BreadcrumbList structured data and visible FAQs. By 21 August 2026, the sitemap listed 321 URLs, 303 of them product pages. As of October 2026, the catalogue has 439 product pages in 10 collections, 497 sitemap URLs and 36 buyer guides. On 5 October 2026, my own audit engine scored arunsilver.com 94/100, up from 90 on 29 September. That is an audit score, not traffic or rankings.

Hand off to WhatsApp

The final step in a price-free catalogue is getting the buyer’s request to your sales team as quickly and cleanly as possible. I use WhatsApp for the Arun Silver inquiry list. When the buyer finishes building their inquiry list on the Arun Silver site, they send it directly to the client over WhatsApp. Email is a separate contact flow. The message arrives already filled in with the exact SKUs and quantities the buyer selected. A password-protected admin page lets the owner see the inquiries and mark designs sold out across the site. If you need a site like this for your business, see website development in Jaipur.