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Can I test bulk product upload without purchasing a license?


Brice

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Hi all,

 

I need to know if I can take an excel spreadsheet from a vendor and upload it to my site to add products. The fields in the spreadsheet are: Part #, Product Name, Weight, MAP, WHL, Manufacturer, Part URL and Photo URL. Can anyone tell me if this is something I can do with cubecart? Also, is there a way to use the photo URL to automatically add a photo for the item on my site? If not I would have to manually download each image and upload it for each product, which would not be feasible.

 

Thank you for your help!

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According to the Features chart, this activity is not available on an unlicensed Cubecart.

 

But, you have a 30-day, no questions asked, money-back guarantee to test this feature.

 

"Is there a way to use the photo URL to automatically add a photo for the item on my site?"

 

Because CubeCart 5 has 99% human-readable code, almost anything can be made to work with it -- given enough time for the coding.

 

So, not currently part of the stock code, but a custom importer can be written to use the image URL to fetch a copy of the image to be stored locally and assign that image to the product. Or, as some have requested, the image URL can be used in situ. See >this conversation.

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Thanks for the reply bsmither. This part confuses me a little: "Or, as some have requested, the image URL can be used in situ." Not sure if 'in situ' is terminology, or if you were just cut off there. The rest makes sense; any tips as to how I could go about getting the custom importer written?

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The HTML that is rendered by CubeCart will contain <img> tags for the product's main and secondary images that pull those images from your store.

 

In situ is latin for "in it's original place".

 

In the above context, there are those store owners who are wanting <img> tags that pull product images from their supplier's repositories -- the original location of the image files.

 

We can help you with developing a custom importer.

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I will go into more detail on what I am trying to achieve.

 

A supplier sends me an excel spreadsheet with thousands of product listings. 

The fields in the spreadsheet are: Part #, Product Name, Weight, MAP (Mfg advertised pricing), WHL (Wholesale cost), Manufacturer, Part URL and Photo URL

 

I want to import the excel file to cubecart to auto-populate my products, somehow using information fetched from the part URL (item specs and desc.) and photo URL (image). The part URL and photo URL are on the suppliers site. My supplier uses Volusion if that helps.

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While all this is do-able, I must caution you that CubeCart orients everything product-related around the internal database table product_id number -- which is not a part number. That means, all sales records log the internal product_id as the item that was sold.

 

So, please give some thought on how you would approach a solution when your supplier delivers a new CSV where the list of products may be different than the previous file. (CubeCart imports plain text CSV files. To import a bona fide Microsoft Excel document will require some obstacles be overcome.) Let us know what you would do in this case.

 

I do not know what Volusion is. I'll look it up later.

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"Does cubecart increment the product ID so items are never duplicated?"

 

No, but that is a responsibility of the MySQL database. The database can be told to start numbering records at a given number when the table is being re-created. If the table is TRUNCATEd, I do not know if the numbering starts over again.

 

If you delete the entire inventory and reload the inventory table with new stuff, all your sales records are now invalid. Your thoughts on that?

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As I understand it - and I'm FAR from knowledgeable! - IF last week's inventory was all shown as Out of Stock (with Out of Stock hidden), rather than deleted AND there's some way that the new inventory can be uploaded as an addition to the existing database, with some items being identical to previous inventory uploads, the new url's for identical items would have a -pxxxx added to the end of the url.

 

Assuming that's possible for this situation, in order to get an over time sales record of an item, it seems to me there would have to be a way to get the sum of all reports for the various -pxxx,-pyyy variations of the same url. Perhaps that would be doable.

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"My supplier uses Volusion if that helps."

 

Nope. Seems to be just another shopping cart solution. What were your thoughts on why you believed this was relevant? (I'm not saying it's not, but I don't see what could be relevant about it at this point.)

 

Because I assumed not all shopping cart solutions are the same, that perhaps Volusion supports this feature natively (I will be checking them out today) and so anyone with prior experience with Volusion may have some input on the issue.

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