Product lists from ditributors

[jwt]

Currently we have 4 different suppliers offering us between 8,000 and 17,000 products so a combined total of about 35,000 products excluding repeats and duplications etc.

 

Obviously it?s not going to be possible to update these by hand, and even using easypopulate requires a mammoth amount of effort copying and pasting various spreadsheets from suppliers to fit.

 

Having searched around I see the same pictures and images name being used by multiple commerce sites, product descriptions and categories being used.

 

This begs the question are people using some sort of EDI import from distributors? Or for generic stuff like PC components are there pre published lists and pics floating around?

 

Even using easypopulate with one distributor who offers good descriptions in their spreadsheet, categorising the products takes over a day.

 

I find it hard to believe that other oscommerce sites with product ranges spanning thousands of items are manually taking photographs or visiting each and every manufacturer website looking for photos, descriptions, weights etc.

 

Or am I missing something really obvious?

 

Regards

 

 

 

John

 

EDIT grrr can't edit the title, apologies for the spelling

[Guest]

if your suppliers offer some sort of exported feeds (like xml) you could utilize some code from the rss contributions and automatically (meaning just clicking a button on the admin end) import the updates to the database.

[videobus]

There's a similar problem with my client, a video store. There are literally over 90,000 movies in existance in various formats, DVD, VHS, etc.

There's only one company I know of (muze.com) that will sell you their database of all info about every movie for an exhorbitant fee. They are used by Amazon, Yahoo, Barnes & Noble, etc. to keep their site info updated.

My client is resigned to the fact that he cannot afford their fees, so he vill have to "borrow" the images and synopsis from these sites one at a time, for his 23,000 item inventory. He figures that the initial insertion may take many months, but the updates of new movies (about 20-50/week) is managable.

 

To answer your inquiry, contact your distributors to find out if there is an EDI available (cost?) to use. This is a perfect example of a need for a contribution to OSC.

[Guest]

To answer your inquiry, contact your distributors to find out if there is an EDI available (cost?) to use. This is a perfect example of a need for a contribution to OSC.

 

There is already the easy populate and at least a thread for import/export csv in the tips and tricks that deal with this.