Managing a large and dyanmic catalogue

[Polecat]

Hi - I'm developing a retailing website which will have a very large product catalogue (c. 10,000 initially) which will change on a fairly frequent basis - e.g. change in stock levels, numerous product additions / deletions, etc, etc.

 

I'm wondering about the "managability" of this through OS Commerce. Two things:

 

1. Is it possible to undertake a "bulk" upload of the initial product catalogue? - The product database will be provided by my supplier though not as MySQL DB (not sure what yet - but at any rate, Excel version is available).

 

2. Will it be possible to feed subsequent catalogue changes automatically? There could be as many as 1000 changes per month.

 

Managing this process by manually entering product details clearly would not be practical.

 

Any thoughts from anyone?

[Velveeta]

Hi - I'm developing a retailing website which will have a very large product catalogue (c. 10,000 initially) which will change on a fairly frequent basis - e.g. change in stock levels, numerous product additions / deletions, etc, etc.

 

I'm wondering about the "managability" of this through OS Commerce. Two things:

 

1. Is it possible to undertake a "bulk" upload of the initial product catalogue? - The product database will be provided by my supplier though not as MySQL DB (not sure what yet - but at any rate, Excel version is available).

 

2. Will it be possible to feed subsequent catalogue changes automatically? There could be as many as 1000 changes per month.

 

Managing this process by manually entering product details clearly would not be practical.

 

Any thoughts from anyone?

 

Yes, this is entirely possible... There are PHP classes available out there for reading in Excel spreadsheets... From there, it would just take determining what columns mapped to what database tables and fields, and write a custom script for that import... If the Excel file is available via FTP, you could even cron a job to run once per month, or week, or whatever, to go out and fetch that file, then perform an update on the database, and you could just set it and forget it...

 

Richard.