Desktop app for product entry - Anyone Interested?
 

I have a desktop app that i wrote for a client which allows you to enter product information for use with xcart

Features at the moment are:

* Import any image from file or clipboard (then saves as thumbnail and full image, and can FTP to server)
* Category Editor (Basic at the moment)
* Inbuilt price updates and item insert by sku with external data
* FTP's two csv files to the server, products and photos for use with the importer
* Entry screen for product information - sku, manufacturer part number, manufacturer, title, description, weight etc.

It's quite a closed system at the moment as it was specially written to integrate with an old dos sage system

What I want to know is, is anyone interested for a nominal fee - if so I'll work on it a bit more and add in a proper category editor and tidy it up a bit.

Cheers![/list]

Moving to Pro Services - Offers.

Yes. I'd be interested. What did you develop it in?

It's developed in delphi using an access db, works great, although I now have to make it multiuser which means moving to mssql or mysql.

I'm working a few changes at the moment, such as the ability to rotate and crop photos, but i also need to sort out the category code!

Ooh, I may be interested as well!

It looks like i'm going to have to get a demo sorted out for people to check this out and find out whether it will suit.

At the moment I'm making a few changes, I've just moved from using an access database to a more robust database to allow multi-user support (so one person can do the photos, one person can do descriptions etc).

I changed the way photo's are uploaded, they are now named as the product name, which should be better for search engines, and an unsharp mask is applied after resampling for sharpness.

At the moment, there are a few improvements I want to make, only 1 photo is allowed per product, the category editor is poorly implemented and there is no allowance for product options.

I'll make a demo available within the next couple of days, perhaps restrict it to only export 1 product - but this should give you an idea of what it does and what the end photos look like.

I'm not even terribly concerned about the photos, I can go in and add them later. I'm just looking for an easier solution to load large numbers of products.

i designed it to be easy to add a large number of products, the client i developed this for does a full export from his accounting package.

If the product is already in my software, the prices etc are updated - but not description or product title.

If items need to be added, all that is needed is a list of sku codes (in this case the sku is linked with their own stock codes) - the program then matches this list with the export from the accounting package to import the rest of the information.

do you have sample data i can have a look at? if the photos are not important i could maybe knock up something that'll take your data and a list of sku's and output a x-cart csv file?

i started playing with access over the weekend, but didn't have enough time to get into it. All I really need is something to create a CSV file to import so when I add products I don't have to go to multiple pages to add the manufacturer, etc. It would basically be a form in Access that has all the available fields and I would plug in my info for the product, and hit submit and the db would be populated and I could export that CSV into X-cart. I'm sure what I'm looking for isn't terribly hard and what you're doing is far more involved.

Eric

i created a quick excel spreadsheet file that you can use to quickly add products - not as nice looking as a full form, but just enter the required info and tab to the next field

get it http://www.dundeemedia.com/xcart_export.xls

That should give you a rough idea, if you create an access database, use the header names (1st row) as the field names.

I've created a demo - it only outputs 5 products and 5 photo's, and the thumbnails are padded to be the same size in bytes as the full photo (but they still view ok as smaller images)

Don't enter a vast quantity of products into the uploader, as the database will change due to the category code being changed.

http://www.dundeemedia.com/software/dmshopuploader.exe

Looks good! That's what I was trying to do with Access but didn't have the time. Having the ability to use the import tab would be nice with the demo.

at the moment the import functions only work for my current client, i didn't have chance yesterday to rewrite it as i was on a training course all day :(

Hi! Your product looks very interesting. Sorry if I'm about to embarrass myself by asking a "dumb" question :), but please could you explain what "Heading & Category Editor" is please? Does this mean you are able to browse to one of your site categories and edit the content, or have I completely missed something?

Many thanks

When I originally created this, there were top headings (ie, Books, DVD's etc) then categories below this - since using xcart, I realise that it's all categories, just with different levels. So you actually create the categories in the program I've written, then these are imported into xcart.