Forum OpenACS Q&A: Re: New & looking for shopping cart

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Posted by Torben Brosten on
Hi Dave,

Two choices on the following page are Upload Vendor Imports and Vendor Imports Add/Update:

ecommerce/www/admin/products/upload-utilities

These scoop up data from other websites which can then be used to import images, change pricing etc.

You provide references that are then used to call up specific pages on other websites. One option allows you to upload a file with the references. The other option allows you to paste the references into a form.

You have to make procs that convert the references into urls, and filter out the html data from the vendor website. However, there are lots of tools provided in ecommerce/tcl/ecds-procs.tcl to make this process fairly easy.

A non-working example of the procs required for each vendor you want to target is at ecommerce/tcl/ecds-ex-procs.tcl

A few years ago, we were using these to literally process more than 20,000 products regularly, helping to generate a healthy revenue stream.

One has to be careful to adhere to copyrights etc, but usually distributors use manufacturer data unaltered, and manufacturers give default permission to use their product data for retail.

It handles multiple vendors, including products represented by more than one vendor You decide in your proc how you want to handle the updated info, and what to ignore.

these ecds_* procs require some specific fields in the ec_custom_product_fields which are defined via the web UI at ecommerce/www/admin/products/custom-fields See: http://cvs.openacs.org/browse/OpenACS/openacs-4/packages/ecommerce/tcl/ecds-procs.tcl?r=1.14 for details

cheers,

Torben

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Posted by Torben Brosten on
ps. Feel free to revise the ecds_ documentation for api-doc to something more understandable. or to ask me when something is unclear.