Product names in feeds

Hi Jill,

This is what the Product Mapping featured was designed to help with. Using this example, in your admin area go to Product Mapping (from the menu along the top); and then create a new mapping. For the master name, you would enter whatever you want all these products to be imported as; for example "Little Miss T-Shirt"; and then click "Add". On the next page, enter one per line all the alternative names that appear in the different feeds for this product.

The mappings are applied during import; so you would need to import any affected feeds again for the changes to take effect.

Cheers,
David.

are there any automated solutions for this?

i mean how the big players do it when they dont have SKUs/EAN/ISBN? they must have some sort of algorithm that "recognized" the matches and thus combine the same products into a group even though each of their product title is different?

can someone point me(and us) to a solution, resources in order to see if i/we can work it out and thus "enhance" PT?

plz elaborate

Brgds

Hi Brgds,

It really is an extremely complicated problem; and i'd be surprised if any of the big price comparison sites (when not using SKUs etc.) automate this process. What I tend to suggest is keeping 2 windows open; one at the admin page editing your product mapping; and another with the main site open where you can search for the product you are trying to match up and then copy and paste matched names into the alternatives box.

Without mapping, and on a big site; whilst it would mean that sometimes the same product is not always grouped together on the one product page; at least with the full text search method it is quite likely that the user will find all instances of the product...

Cheers,
David.

Hi David,

Sometimes the product names are extremely long. Is there a way we can shorten it. Is it possible for us to browse thru those long product names so we can decide to shorten it or otherwise because there are thousands of products.

thanks
jack

Hello Jack,

Sure - you can use the Product Mapping feature. In your admin area, go to Product Mapping, and create a new entry with the short product name you require; and then on the next page enter the longer version in the alternatives box. The changes will be applied the next time you import the feed...

Cheers,
David.

Hi David,

Got it. thanks.

Let say we have 100,000 products from all the merchants. We do not know how long is the product names. Maybe out of 3000 products has a very long names. How can we extract those 3000 products with the long names list them out. Is there a mechanism when we enter like if products name is long than certain number of characters (ie 20 characters) then list all of it. So we can proceed to shorten it to not long than 20 characters.

Hope you get what i meant.

thanks
jack

Hello Jack,

Some simple SQL could be used to list product names longer than a certain length.

Do you have a database administration tool such as phpMyAdmin installed?

If you do, simply select your Price Tapestry database, go to the SQL tab, and then run a query like:

Alternatively, you could use a modified version of the allproducts.php script from this thread:

http://www.pricetapestry.com/node/965

(needs to be run from your /admin/ folder)

Simply change the SQL from

to...

Cheers,
David.

Hi David,

Wow! I am impressed. Anything is possible. You are sure a genius.

thanks
jack