Web service to upload products?

[jeepwhisperer]

I'm about to try uploading about 8000 products to PrestaShop, which it appears is at best a trial and error process, and I want to know what options I might have going into this. Right now all my data is in a Filemaker database, including pictures. Is it possible... or a good idea... to try using Web Service to directly link Filemaker to Prestashop and import all this data? I'm not sure what's all involved, but it could skip the whole CSV part of the process, and make future revisions simpler.

 

Also, if I were to import product data by whatever means, which includes things like categories, manufacturers, suppliers, etc, will the relevant category, manufacturer, and supplier records be created automatically?

 

Last, maybe I haven't stumbled on the documentation yet, but I don't see how to import product images. It talks about image URLs, but is this the location of an image on my local computer, where I can be downloaded from, or do I need to create an "image" directory on the server, upload all of them, then link to the URL's in the database? Does PrestaShop store images, or just links to images located elsewhere?

Thanks for the help!

[RogueWaveLimited]

Of course you can write custom code to get the data from your Filemaker and use the web service to import everything if you are good at coding. But it's probably easier to just get the export from filemaker and the import of the CSV to your store working. Once you have the formats down it should work every time.

 

Yes, if you upload a category that doesn't exist it will be created. I'm not sure about manufacturers but I would guess that would work the same.

 

The product image URL is the path to your image wherever it is. PS will go get the image and import it into your store into another file of its own naming.

 

I've found it to be much easier to get one product working in import before trying many hundreds.

 

Also I've found that the store will time out if you try to import too many products at one time so I divide files up into segments and do each one separately.

 

If you want some professional (read: paid) help I'm available to do this type of work.

[jeepwhisperer]

Thanks for the tips! I hadn't considered that a large upload might time out... good idea to break it up. I'll try a few products today and see how it goes.

 

Since product pictures are certainly the main bulk of the upload size, would it help (as far as the timeout goes) to FTP them into a directory on the server first, then load them from there?  Just thinking...

 

I like the idea of using an actual database as a client, although PrestaShop might do all the things I assumed I'd have to do externally.

 

Being the scrooge that I am, I'm not quite ready for paid assistance, but I'll keep you in mind if that changes!  Thanks!

[RogueWaveLimited]

Yes, if you ftp your images to a server directory then reference the server image in the import that will speed up things quite a bit.