We are setting up a site which syncs with our Intuit Quickbooks POS system and need some help with field mappings for products. CS-Cart has two mandatory fields, “Product code” and “Product id”. The POS Inventory_Items table has a key field “Item Number”. I'm assuming POS “Item Number” should be mapped to CS-Cart “Product ID”. Is this correct? If so, what needs to go into cs-Cart “Product code” field? Is this generated by CS-Cart and if not, what should it be?
There are some other fields in POS, probably seven in all, that we want to represent in CS-Cart and to be searchable but I don't know where they should go in CS-Cart. They are:
POS_artist
POS_medium
POS_editionType
POS_editionNumber
POS_keywords (for site search, only a few words, 32 chars long)
POS_size (not for shipping, size of product in inches)
POS_brand
There may be a few more in time. As mentioned, we want them displayed with products and searchable by customers. What's the best way to do this? We could overload the CS-Cart “Description” field by using some delimiter within this field. Would the overloaded “Description” field be searchable for specific values of the delimited fields? Would formatting the overloaded “Description” field be a problem?
Perhaps it would be better to use CS-Cart product features? In this case each feature added to CS-Carty product would correspond to a Quickbooks POS export field. Could these feature values be imported into CS-Cart with from CSV text file?
Thanks for any help.
Product_id is an internal unique auto-incremented value in CS-Cart.
Product_code is a user-defined value - I make certain they are unique.
I use Product_code for Quickbook's Item Name/Number value (which is also user-defined and must be unique).
The additional fields from the POS that you listed would be set up in CS-Cart's Product Features.
Personally I don't use Quickbooks POS, I use Quickbooks for accounting software, so my sales data and customer data is imported FROM CS-Cart INTO Quickbooks. I don't import FROM Quickbooks INTO CS-Cart.
Thanks. That's helpful. If I set them up as features can they be imported from a CSV file? I will not really be importing directly from QBPOS but rather doing an export into a CSV file and then importing from that into CS-Cart. What's important is that I can import features for all products at once.
That is going to be fairly difficult.
After you manually set up the features and their variants (where applicable) in CS-Cart, you still have to assign each CS-Cart feature_id and variant_id to each product_id in the cscart_product_features_values table - and that table uses the product_id that is auto-assigned to each imported product. You will have to do a join to the product table to accomplish that.
Time consuming… but not impossible. You would import your data directly into the db table from CSV.
Thanks again. I will not have variants so that simplifies things a bit. POS Item Number == CS-Cart Product code. So first I need to import all products from POS into CS-Cart via CSV import where every Product in CS-Cart will also get a Product id. I will need to generate a features_values file from QBPOS which includes the CS-Cart Product id for importing into cscart_product_features_values table. What is the structure of the cscart_product_features_values table (or where can I find it)? I'm guessing it's something like:
Product id, Feature ID, Feature code, Feature Value
You will need to connect to the CS-Cart database.
Your host can provide you with either hosted software like phpMyAdmin or a direct connection for remote software. I just use the phpMyAdmin that is included with cPanel. You can import / export, run queries and modify structure with phpMyAdmin.
Sounds good. There's actually an ODBC driver for Quickbooks POS so I might be able to build a backend right on my office POS server.