Best Approach to Export Products for a Client

[tivicrdotcom]

Hello fellow geeks, so we are in conversations with a customer who is in the social recognition business and would like us to be their product provider. Nothing fancy there right, we tried hard to convinced him the best scenario was to award gift cards for their clients to redeem at our shop but he insisted he wanted to receive an XLS archive with all the products and keep it constantly updating it.

 

So in other words, we sent them the products, they make them available to their clients, and get back to us with orders because everything has to be handled on their side. Sort of manual mode running here!

So he wants to be able to have an always updated inventory to avoid placing orders for out of stock products, no problem with that either but the problem arises because of the format he wants the products on.

He wants them in Excel which PS currently does but is asking for a few custom fields which I don't see a problem either. For example he wants the products displayed on his Excel sheet with a few custom fields such as 5 product features, so I guess I will have to create a new product_field where I can input the 5 features so when I export it he can see them as well.

So my questions are:

Is there an auto mode of exporting the products to a XLS sheet online where the customer can retrieve it whenever he wants? As of now, we have a sheet set up for him via Goolge Sheets and there we provide the products but is done manually, I guess one could simply export the product sheet from PS and upload it into the Google Sheet document?

Another method could be via API (Web Service)? I am not very familiar with this but I believe is similar to an Amazon API I currently use, will do some research on this though.
 

What are your thoughts on making it the easiest for both client and myself to be on the same page regarding inventory? Eventually orders should be done the same way because otherwise it would be too time consuming, everything as automated as possible right?

We are currently working old school through Google Sheets because we only have 30 products so it not a biggie to make changes, we go in manually to the shared Excel sheet and edit stuff and it gets reflected immediately for the customer to review or update on his end. Customer wants to increase to 500 products which I can provide with through my Amazon API but updating manually that list is impossible.

Anyways, any advise will be greatly appreciated!

cheers,
AJ

 

[DataKick]

I'll shamelessly promote my own free module. This kind of integration is exactly what I'm shooting for.

 

With datakick module, you can

 

1) create custom fields for your products/categories/customers/orders/...

2) create lists with any fields you want, including custom fields created in previous step. List can have conditions to filter out some products.

3) create scheduled tasks that will export this list to CSV format regularly. Output csv file can be stored on you server, or uploaded to any ftp server on the internet (for example ftp server of your partner)

4) or, you can create endpoint - special URL that will generate and return fresh csv file every time someone access it. This is ideal to serve up-to-date data to your partners

 

You can give it a try at my demo account. If you need any help or assistance, I'd be happy to help. 

 

Cheers

Petr

[tivicrdotcom]

Petr, thanks for replaying. That''s exactly what I am looking for. Will demo later o today and get back to you. Thanks a bunch!

 

Cheers,

AJ

[tivicrdotcom]

Looks promising, I lack patience to play a lot with the module, so you wouldn't happen to have a video showing how to create/output the following fields:

MODEL #

PRODUCT NAME

IMAGe

LINK

DESCRIPTION

BRAND

CATEGORY

SUBCATEGORY

OPTIONS

PRICE (TAX)

DISCOUNT

FINAL PRICE

S&H

TOTAL

QUANTITY

[DataKick]

Hi, sure, here's the video. Most of these fields are already available in Product collection. We will need to join in Manufacturer for brand information, and Category for category/subcategory information. Also, I'm not sure what Options field should contain.

 

The process:

 

1) open Lists

2) create new Lists

3) select Products as base / default collection

4) find fields in Available fields list, and add them to Fields

5) join-in Manufacturers collection, and add name field to output

6) join-in Category collection, add Path field (contains whole category path), and use tail / head / init function to extract category we are interested in

7) save & create endpoint

8) open endpoint  

 

 

I've saved this list in my demo account, you can log in and play with it. You can also export the template and import it to your own store.

 

Let me know if you have any questions or encounter any problems

[tivicrdotcom]

Thanks Petr, the one you created is under lists -> Product list unused template? I see it displays some of the fields (ID, Name, Base Price, Categories, Long Description and Quantity), so how can I save that list as an XML. On top I have Datalist, Columns and Highlighting but none of them have export option. I could generate a csv file by creating an URL but that would only give me the option to download, I guess I could download it and then upload it into a template, I just thought there was a feature one could go directly from a list to a ready to be deployed template?

Ultimately the idea is to leave the URL linked and working withe my database so I could sort of fort about it and focus only on my ps platforms, any changes done there will be reflected on the URL (endpoint). The module looks very promising, you sure did a hell of a job, lots of freedom to manipulate data and that is always a plus in the IT world.

Cheers,
AJ

[DataKick]

Thanks Petr, the one you created is under lists -> Product list unused template? I see it displays some of the fields (ID, Name, Base Price, Categories, Long Description and Quantity), so how can I save that list as an XML. On top I have Datalist, Columns and Highlighting but none of them have export option. I could generate a csv file by creating an URL but that would only give me the option to download, I guess I could download it and then upload it into a template, I just thought there was a feature one could go directly from a list to a ready to be deployed template?

 

Ultimately the idea is to leave the URL linked and working withe my database so I could sort of fort about it and focus only on my ps platforms, any changes done there will be reflected on the URL (endpoint). The module looks very promising, you sure did a hell of a job, lots of freedom to manipulate data and that is always a plus in the IT world.

 

Cheers,

AJ

 

 

Hi,

I'm little bit confuses what are you trying to achive. If you want to popuplate / overwrite data in your google docs template than it will not work. DataKick can only export data in

CSV format.

 

Usually this is what your customers / partners want. You will provide them with url (you have created using datakick's endpoint functionality), and they can download csv file with fresh data whenever they want. You partners will, most probably, want to automatically import these data to theirs own system - csv format is much better to do this then excel / google docs format.

[tivicrdotcom]

I understand, which one was the one you created on your demo version with my fields? What's is it under?