Can't find an option to replace existing products when importing

[wmc]

Hi,i am only new to CubeCart (or anything to do with setup of online store's in fact) so i appologise in advance for any questions that may have obvious answers.

 

I manage the spare parts and accessories department of a large, long standing motorcycle dealership. We have recently begun the setup of an online store using CubeCart.

 

I have succesfully imported over 85,000 products (using "import catalogue) and i'm expecting the product count to get beyond 150,000 by the time we are ready to go live.

 

The issue that im trying to get around is, when i import a product that already exists , i end up with 2 of the same product. I assumed there would be an option to replace that product only. However as far i can tell, there is only the option to "replace existing invetory". When i tried this, all of my products dissapeared and i was left with only the products that i imported with the most recent catalogue.

 

As i get new price files regularly from my distributors, i was hoping to just import there .csv of updated products and replace the existing products of the same product code. Removing all of my products and starting over would just be to much work with how often i need to do the updates.

 

Have i missed an option somewhere that allows me to do what i need?

 

Any help would be greatly appriciated.

 

Thanks, regards Owen.

 

 

[bsmither]

Welcome wmc! Glad to see you made to the forums.

 

As well as I know CubeCart, I can say with some assurance that every version of CC was never programmed for having inventory continuously "stocked" and details consistently upgraded from an external source.

 

That said, there is no reason why CubeCart could not be made to do this, provided Devellion programs that facility into some future version.

 

That said, what can we do about it today? The critical issue is that if a record from the CSV is to UPDATE an existing table record, there must be a uniquely identifiable column in the table, and the only such currently existing column is the product_id (which is not the product_code). Unless and until your external source can accurately and precisely maintain the product_id with the updated details for that product, many things at some point in time will get seriously whacked. So...

 

What about making some other column an index which requires uniqueness? Let's look at the product_code column. Can you guarantee that for all of your 150,000 item inventory, a Product Code of "SWA-12" (for example) will never be the product code of more than one product? Fortunately, CC5 has a column for the UPC, EAN, JAN, and ISBN codes. (I have never heard of a distinct code being used on more than one product.) Can your inventory list guarantee there will always be a UPC code? If so,

 

MySQL has a command to UPDATE a record if there is an existing record ("Duplicate record exists error") when the INSERT command fails.

 

We can certainly look at how to make a solution based on this approach.