xml feeds

One of my wholesalers has a XML BASE FEED that allows me to feed all there products to my site. They also offer straight xml documents of each product. My question is how would i incorporate this into cs-cart. Make it work for that matter.



They told me I have to have a programmer to do this for me. Is this true or can i do it myself?



Thanks,



Chris

If anyone has any info on this please let me know.

I am currently having an xml module developed to install into cs cart, its costing me quite a bit to have a freelancer do the work.



Its nearly done but im still not sure how to use an XML feed, and im not sure if im going to get what im paying for.



Can anyoner give me some advice on the following?



Is it something that is fed to your website through the internet… similar to an RSS or am i going to have to constantly upload an XML file to my site every other day if something is changed or updated by my supplier??



What is a cron job? do i have to use it… as in import by cron?

Also, do i have to set some kind of category delimiter??



Last but not least… how does the field mapping work as suppliers field names will no doubt differ to CS Cart field names?



Any info on this subject would be much appreciated cos i know very little about it.



Thanks.

I’ve run into this issue with XML feeds myself.



If you want to import your xml to cs-cart’s mysql database you probably need a programmer to write a script that s****es data from the XML feed. The script would usually run every time you expect the xml feed to update. This would be done by creating a cron job (a scheduled task created in your hosting control panel) to run your script periodically, so you wouldn’t have to run it yourself manually.



However there are several challenges you may experience while importing a XML feed. Field mapping XML feed with CS-cart’s field is one. Another is that your data might need to be modified for certain fields, such as the “Features” and “Options” field. Both these issues should not be difficult for a competent programmer to take on. The more annoying hurdle is the price, because if the XML feed is from one of your vendors, they may use the cost price, which you obviously you do not want to import. You could ask the programmer to multiple the cost price by a fixed multiplier, but you lose flexibility when setting your price.



If you want total control you may need to spend quite a bit to get exactly what you want.

On my site i have about 7500 products imported via an xml feed. They are all updated nightly e.g. hide products that are no longer available update missing information and adds new products. I also have it set up so that every time a user clicks on a product the cart checks the latest price and product quantity with my suppliers feed and updates the SQL database if there is a change before the customer sees the page, this takes less than a second. There is a link to the site in my forum user profile. You can contact the coder “Kevin” here [URL=“http://www.zofish.com/”]http://www.zofish.com/[/URL] He also done the parcel tracking sidebox on my site.

[quote name=‘AleksB’]On my site i have about 7500 products imported via an xml feed. They are all updated nightly e.g. hide products that are no longer available update missing information and adds new products. I also have it set up so that every time a user clicks on a product the cart checks the latest price and product quantity with my suppliers feed and updates the SQL database if there is a change before the customer sees the page, this takes less than a second. There is a link to the site in my forum user profile. You can contact the coder “Kevin” here [URL=“http://www.zofish.com/”]http://www.zofish.com/[/URL] He also done the parcel tracking sidebox on my site.[/QUOTE]



How much did it cost to you to have XML import system in Your CSC?

[quote name=‘arunas@simonaitis.lt’]How much did it cost to you to have XML import system in Your CSC?[/QUOTE]



Hi,



It cost £520, but as the APIs can differ i suppose the price can too. In my case it paid for itself rather quickly due to the larger product range on offer.



Regards,

Aleks

[quote name=‘AleksB’]On my site i have about 7500 products imported via an xml feed. They are all updated nightly e.g. hide products that are no longer available update missing information and adds new products. I also have it set up so that every time a user clicks on a product the cart checks the latest price and product quantity with my suppliers feed and updates the SQL database if there is a change before the customer sees the page, this takes less than a second. There is a link to the site in my forum user profile. You can contact the coder “Kevin” here [URL=“http://www.zofish.com/”]http://www.zofish.com/[/URL] He also done the parcel tracking sidebox on my site.[/QUOTE]



Hello, we try to do the same for our shopping system. But we have a problem. When the data is bigger than 2MB the transfer stops. When we try to split the data, some information of the products are not transfering to our server. Did you face the same problem?