Fifteen years on the same problem

2011 — a store to fill

I had a PrestaShop store and one week to fill it. Two hundred products to create, most of them available in several colours and several sizes. Every variation had to become a listing in its own right, with its own reference, photos and description.

After two days, the maths was clear: at that pace, it would take me a month. So I stopped typing and wrote a tool to do it for me. Crude, ugly, with no interface worth the name — but it generated the listings and sent them to the store. One week was enough.

What that first tool taught me

That the problem wasn't data entry itself. It was repetition: the same product typed in twelve times for twelve colours, then once more for every store you sell on. Work with zero added value, eating up the hours you should be spending on selling.

That existing tools missed the point. The CMSs' built-in CSV imports handle large, structured volumes well, but they assume the file already exists and is clean. They don't help you create variations, fill twelve listings from a single one, or feed two stores at once.

That the real difficulty wasn't the concept: it was in the details of each CMS. A product filed in a subcategory that shows up nowhere because the parent category wasn't linked. A VAT rate that doesn't exist on the store and sends the product out without tax. A saved change that never makes it online. Each of these traps cost me hours.

2026 — ListoMax

ListoMax is that 2011 idea, taken all the way. The Series feature is its direct descendant: fill in one form, and get as many complete listings as the variations you entered.

Everything else was built around it, shaped by what real stores demand. Parent categories that must be linked for a product to show up in navigation. VAT rates that must be read from the store rather than guessed. Variants that must not break when you republish. Images that must actually be uploaded. History that must be kept so you can roll back.

Every feature is validated on real stores before release: PrestaShop 8, PrestaShop 9, WooCommerce. After each publication, the software reads the listing back from the store to check it received what was sent. It takes longer to build. It's the only way to know it works.

The principle that drives development

No silent failures. Ever.

A customer using ListoMax can't open a developer console to figure out what happened. If something fails, they need to see it on screen, and know which product is affected and why. An error you can see can be fixed; a silent error loses data without anyone noticing.

This principle has real consequences. A change that couldn't be saved has to say so. A VAT rate that can't be found has to block the publication rather than let it through with the wrong rate. An image that wasn't uploaded has to show up in the error list, not vanish into thin air.

It's the kind of detail you never see on a sales page. Yet it's what makes the difference between a tool you keep using and a tool you drop after three weeks.

An independent project

ListoMax isn't published by a company selling ten other software products. It's an independent project, developed and supported by the same person. When you write to support, that's who answers.

What this means for you: your feedback directly shapes what gets built next. A feature requested by several users jumps to the top of the list. A reported bug is fixed in the next version, not two years from now.

What it also means: timelines depend on one person. We'd rather tell you upfront than have you find out later.