Multiple Feeds from one Merchant

Hi Mike,

Not as it stands as the merchant name is the primary key on the feeds table, which in turn drives the merchant index. More importantly, the merchant name is used to purge the products table of that merchant's products before importing the feed (so that old products are removed).

This situation has come up before and the best alternative seems to map to the fact that the separte feeds are often related to separate departments. You can then register the separate feeds against merchant names like "Merchant - Electrical", "Merchant - Home and Garden" etc.

Hope this helps,
Cheers,
David.

I just had a thought

Would it be possible to put one feed into the database, then using phpadmin put the rest of the records into the database.

Although it might not show every product as clickable links, but the feeds would be in the database anyway, so when someone searches then it would be found.

Just a thought.

Not sure if this helps but it's how I've done it on one of my sites.

Brand is a redundant field for me as not all merchants use it in their feeds. So what I've done is name each feed "Shop - Department" and given it a brand called "Shop".

For example:

1.csv - merchant (Play DVDs) brand (Play)
2.csv - merchant (Play Games) brand (Play)
3.csv - merchant (Play Gadgets) brand (Play)

Essentially the list of brands becomes a list of merchants.

Like I said, it may not suit everyone.

Thanks all for your suggestions.

scorpionwsm: Sounds like a possibility with a little extra work to try any automate it - I wouldn't fancy doing it manually for all the feeds on a daily basis.

dbfcs: Also sounds like a possibility. We do make use of the brands section, but I wonder if a new section couldn't be added along those lines... I've managed to add extra fields to the products database for different currencies, so I don't think it would be that hard to do...

My latest thought has been to duplicate the functionality in the Category Mapping in admin, - rather than saying "DVDs, videos, computer games all come under the category Entertainment", we say "Play1, Play2, Play3 all come under the merchant Play", if you catch my drift. I'm currently trying to understand how the Category Mapping works, but if anyone has any straight forward methods of doing this, please let me know...

Thanks again,

Mike

Hi Mike,

Daily updating seems a bit overkill being honest unless it is a very small site with small product feeds.

So far I haven't got around to doing cron jobs and stuff like that, I'm still on the what happens when I press this red button stage.

As soon as I can do automatic then I would probaly do a sites product feed once a week, maybe even two weeks, depending upon how many sites that I have and the product feeds involved.

I might try and find out how to do it today and give it a test actually.

Personally with Play I just call it Play Gadgets, Play Music Play DVDs etc, the feed would be massive if you incorporated.

I did have an idea of simply renaming the product feeds, and then uploading them and using putty to import, but sadly that never worked, it just overwrites the last feed.

Not sure if this helps but http://msdn.microsoft.com/msdnmag/issues/03/03/XMLFiles/ can merge the xml files together looks a bit complex for me, so your have to give it a go :)

Regards

Mark

hello,

i had the same problem with 2 merchants feeds (500.000 products each in 10 feeds).

I made a second script named import+.php where i did not delete old products but only add multiple feeds to the same merchant (eg : ./import+.php mymerchant-feednumberXX.xml).

you have to write a new function in includes/admin.php based on admin_import function and delete the sql query "DELETE FROM ..." and some other things.