Follow up to my last question: Bulk Populate site using CSV or XML?

W

writtenstyle

newbie taking action
Nov 3, 2008
666
11
0
This is a follow up to the other thread I created - How to Bulk Load items into a shopping Cart.

Short Story: I found a wholesaler so I can sell products and shed the affiliate label for one niche. The distributor has a few thousand products that I need to get into my site.

I talked to the distributor I am going to use for my products. They have an available XML feed I can use, as well as the CSV. I know nothing about either, but I am going to hire some one. I just need to know what to hire them for.

The CSV is very dirty. There are products and fields that arent needed for a website, and the prices on the CSV are wholesale prices.

Basically, I want to know this. Which option (CSV or XML feed) will offer me the easiest upkeep once the site is up and running? Which option will allow me to "BULK" change the prices? I dont want to have to change thousands of prices one at a time. I would like to just do a percentage increase across the board. I will most likely use zen cart and wordpress.

Thanks
 


I'd go with XML simply because the data will already need to conform to some kind of standard, and can be handled directly by langs like php.

There would generally be less steps involved in the process of fetching the data and getting it live to your site, especially handy when your provider updates their data frequently.
 
For a good coder, assuming both sets of data are equally correct, I don't think it'll make much difference.
 
What about the later part of my question? All the prices are wholesale, so I will have to change all the prices. I would like to do something like, bulk increase the prices 40% across the board, instead of having to change every price manually. Is that possible with XML or CSV? The CSV is really dirty.
 
I've got a site runing something similair (about 3000 products) I had somebody manually strip out the shit and add everything to a database (simple Access - I'm a .asp script kiddy ;-).

Price increases across the board are simple - just code your pages to call the price as price x 0.4 or whatever. I code the price multiplier as a variable called from the database - that way I can set it as price x 2 as a default but I still have product by product control if I need to make any specific changes or if I want to run some sort of special.

Is your markup really only 40%? I wouldn't play the drop shipper game if I couldn't at least double up unless the product was seriously high demand or big ticket.
 
How much should I look at budgeting for this project? The entire project including the price increase detailed by Crabb above?
 
writtenstyle said:
How much should I look at budgeting for this project? The entire project including the price increase detailed by Crabb above?
Click to expand...


can you post a sample of the source data and a mockup of how you want it displayed (general idea of the page structure for your frontend)?
 
Been here done this. Best advice: Do not try to take your manufacturers data and import it into your site/cart directly.

1. Get this data into a database and make it your own. Create your own part numbers (don't use theirs) based on your database key id.
2. Add the needed fields for your shopping cart to your database. Best way to set up the needed fields is look at your shopping cart and see what they need.
3. Get everything set up (keywords, sellingprice, etc) the way you want in your database
4. Extract your data from from your database and upload from that.
 
Sounds good patrick, but I have no technical knowledge. I think I am going to post this in the BST section.

If anyone can help with this project, Pm me a quote and what you can do.
 
If you're using ZenCart, get the CSV data, and use EasyPopulate Advanced to move it in and out of ZenCart. Makes things really easy and you can use Excel to clean your data, modify prices, etc. If you know Excel well, it's great, and EasyPopulate Advanced is cheap.
 
I don't know Zen Cart well, but in X-Cart, assigning markup globally is easy-peasy. I would assume ZC is similar.
 
You must log in or register to reply here.
Top Bottom