Re: Application Specific Mod: Are you interested?
 

No, Not yet....
I had looked into it and its pretty intense as a data set....

Re: Application Specific Mod: Are you interested?
 

I would settle for a partial.

Re: Application Specific Mod: Are you interested?
 

I realize this thread has been dead for a couple months, but I could use an AAIA compliant search also. We have over 4000 parts that fit pretty much everything on 4 wheels for the past 40 years. Some of these parts crossover to over 200 different models. We currently have all of our application data in AAIA compliant tables as well.

Here is how I see this type of mod working. You import an application table into the database that has all the make, model, yearfrom, yearto, submodel, engine, trans, drivetype, partnumber, etc. info. Then make your selection using the usual dropdown menus that query the application table and returns all of the relavent partnumbers. Is this something that one of the add-on search mod's (Supersearch?) could do?

The problem I see with many of the attempts at this is that they still rely on relating the parts to the vehicle with the categories and that really doens't matter for a store that caters to all makes & models. Sure you need categories to put the parts in, but the number of parts categories vs. number of vehicle combinations is pretty small. In our case we have 60-80 part types that fit over 130k different combinations of make, model, year.

Even though my programming skills are extremely weak I would be willing to collaborate and work through this with anyone in a similar position. I just got my first installation of X-Cart installed today so the learning curve will be steep for me.

Cheers, Adam

Re: Application Specific Mod: Are you interested?
 

I would be all over this.

Re: Application Specific Mod: Are you interested?
 

Well I want and need to rekindle this especially with XCART looking at new versions.

We are 92k products now and 7000 categories in an attempt to help customers find their products organically on our site. I desperately need a solution to support the AAIA/PIES/ACES data format sets as our manufacturers are now sending it to us in this format. In addition many of these products/SKU's fit many vehicles and as such we need to enter them enter X CART in that fashion. However X Cart won't allow duplicate SKU entries---which is a problem. Each product spanned across it's applications needs to be entered into X CART so that CDSEO creates it's unique URL.

X CART is really making it difficult to stay up with the times here. I have supplied Jon at websiteCM with sample data sets of the AAIA/ACES/PIES information and hope to follow up with him soon.

For those who are trying to use X CART in an automotive parts setting please sound off here-

Re: Application Specific Mod: Are you interested?
 

We are using our AAIA/PIES/ACES data on our XCart site. We've got 4000+ parts in 73 categories. Our search does year/make/model then shows you all parts with a box at the top that gives you the choice to narrow the results by any relavent qualifiers for the vehicle selected. Seems to work well for us without any commercial mods. I am a mechanical engineer without any formal computer/database training and I worked through it with help from this forum and others on the web.

As was said before, the commercial mods currently available are not capable of what you or I need. If you are getting your data from several manufacturers you need to make sure that it is organized consistently or you must be able to manipulate it so that it is. This could prove to be a huge hurdle. We deal only with our own data so its fairly easy for us.

We have parts that fit hundreds of different vehicles and each part only needs the one SKU. You will need to add the application data to the XCart database so that you can search that and reference the products in the XCart tables. That's how we did it. We are also using CDSEOPro without any problems since each product is only listed once.

Updating is straight forward, but not streamlined. I update the applications data directly in PHPMySQL and the products using the traditional XCart methods. Not difficult, but not exactly point and click.

We manufacture and sell only chassis parts, so as such, we do not need many of the qualifiers that you may be looking for, but it would be easy to add more.

I would love to have an add-on to XCart that would streamline all of this, but we've worked around it for now. I would be interested to know how many sites are using XCart and AAIA data together or would want to if they had the opportunity.

www.ingallseng.com

Re: Application Specific Mod: Are you interested?
 

Hope to revive this, any progress? Are there any mods yet...3 years later for x-cart that covers AAIA Legacy data or ACES???

Re: Application Specific Mod: Are you interested?
 

Not that I'm aware of. We've been running our custom page for going on 3 years now without much issue using the ACES tables. I doubt there are many with Xcart that can afford to pony up the yearly subscription fees to have access to the tables. They really are geared towards the aftermarket companies that need to exchange part application and interchange data, not the small retailer that wants to have a list of all vehicles available for the last 70+ years. YMMV...

Re: Application Specific Mod: Are you interested?
 

I just found this topic by Goggle for "same part fits many models"
Definitely been hitting head against the wall trying to find/implement some sort of filtering by Make/Model/Year. I just purchased BCS Engineering Advanced Filter in hope to get closer to achieving this (hope it will work).
Before I came to help on this project, cart had over 15,000 subcategories (e.g Oil Pan-> all Makes like Ford, etc. -> all Models -> all Years as that was the only way customers can find their parts.

Another problem I found is we also have same parts that fit many different Makes, Models and Years and I've been thinking the best way to optimize these parts for search and SEO, I started cloning the parts and renaming the tiles and descriptions for specific model/year so Search engines can pick them up better and also I noticed the x-cart search box did not pick up Detailed descriptions but only short ones unless using Advanced Search so I did not want to have all the models listed in short description (it would look odd in category pages).

For example 1966-1975 GM Harmonic Balancer fits so many models (APOLLO 73-75 6-250 w/o AC, BLAZER/JIMMY (full size) 69-74 6-250, BUICK SPECIAL 68-71 6-250 w/o AC, CAMARO 67-69 6-250 w/o AC, CAMARO 70-74 6-250, CHEVELLE 67-69 6-250 w/o AC, CHEVELLE 70-74 6-250........list goes on and on)

So I'm wondering what is the best way to handle this?
Create new product for each model?

I appreciate any suggestions and experiences.

P.S. I'm very interested in this module development.

Re: Application Specific Mod: Are you interested?
 

We looked at the BCS module but determined it would not suit our ultimate goals. It was too simplistic for the size of our inventory and application range.

Do you currently have your application data in a spreadsheet or database? If so, you could break that up into the appropriate tables, if not done so yet, and import them into the xcart dbase and query the parts from them. That is basically all we are doing. BTW, the info that is imported is not any of the AAIA tables directly, but just the data we need that relates to our parts.

We have a couple parts that fit 300+ different applications and only have one part (product) listed in XCart. I have another little module that pulls all the different applications for each part and shows it at the bottom of the detail screen for that part. IES2004S You are correct that this technique will not have the application info linked to the part for SEO but I'm not sure of any other large inventory websites that have it done that way. I don't think its very feasible maintaining the data would be more difficult. At least for my level of web development.

Once you have the application data in the xcart database you can do anything you want with it. Easier said than done. It took me months to work through this and it could still use a bit of tweaking.