Application Specific Mod: Are you interested?
 

I'm not sure where to post this, so I'm sorry if its in the wrong spot.

I've developed an application specific application for our website, which uses x-cart. It's not in a form of resell, or modifications for other sites, but... if I had enough interest, I'm sure I could create something.

You can see it here:
http://www.sparcoracing.com/product.php?productid=134&cat=26&page=1

And here:
http://www.sparcoracing.com/product.php?productid=236&cat=22&page=1
Try and search for a 2003 Honda Civic

Any comments, suggestions?

*EDIT* Version would be for current branch 4.1.0 + *

Thanks

Moving to Third Party Add-ons. Also, would be helpful if you mention what version this would be for.

:arrow: http://www.cart-lab.com/Brand-Model-Year-40x-p-40.html

Same thing it seems, just not 4.1.x compatible, Yet. :wink:

That is VERY generic, and badly done. A few problems with that is it lists like what vehicles you cater to, NO model, NO sub-model, NO engine, NO specific requirements. You then have to pick what category you want? And so on? Badly done, no offense, IБ─≥m just letting you know, we have been in the aftermarket industry for WELL over 40 years, and that will definitely not suffice.

In the aftermarket industry going by the make only, WILL NOT WORK! I highly doubt (actually I know they donБ─≥t), that they go by any type of AAIA, or Legacy 1 or 2 data. We had an option of going with their product, but after looking at the example, we were highly disappointed (after all your only spending 50 bucks?), what does that tell you about the mod? It may work for some people selling universal make products, but nothing that will work for an industry like ours (over 120+ manufactures).

Obviously you don't understand the drill down of the mod. Yes, it is generic, I've even had people use this same mod on Printer Catridge stores, Auto Part stores, etc.

There is no categories to choose.

Look to the right.

:arrow: http://shopping.lightningmotorsports.com/customer/home.php

I realize it has quirks and could handle some polishing, however overall it does the same EXACT thing yours is doing. :roll:

There is a "Model". Most average consumers are not going to care for a "Sub-Model", or such. Just the generic info on the car/product they own to find any relative products available.

My bad, I would suggest you remove your demo off of your site, only thing I noticed in the demo was some generic stuff at the top of it.

No problem, Just trying to defend my modification is all :) I probably should be using the lightningmotorsport.com site for my example vs extremepsi.com as they've modified it slightly.

I know alot of people want some kind of AJAX'd version so you won't have to page refresh for new selectors based on previous.

Anyhow, glad to see I wasn't the only one with the same idea in mind. :wink:

Being a supporter of the AAIA standards format, I dont see why nobody has actually set out to build a compliant system for Xcart as of yet?
The standards require a breakdown of Year, Make , Model, Submodel, and then even further "qualifiers" to correctly find a product. These standards will most likely be strongly incorporated within the next 5 years to most manufacturers providing that developers start catering to the system.
There are allot of Xcarters selling automotive parts, and with the constant evolution of new auto business being developed, a xcart mod will do very well.

Re: Application Specific Mod: Are you interested?
 

I need something along these lines, however neither mods are quite up to spec.. We have already implemented http://www.cart-lab.com/Brand-Model-Year-40x-p-40.html but this is essentially its own section. Something more integrated with the product itself, or within categories would be very useful as our current way of doing products that suit 150 makes and models is to list 150 different products. The mod initially listed here does a call to collect different makes and models that the product is not available for. It it could be done with ajax so the page doesn't need to reload, and only call makes/models/years that the product is available for, then it would be right on the money. We already have the make/model/year info entered for each product due to the cart lab mod, so in theory it just needs to run a check on the db to ensure that only makes/models/years that are available show.

BTW, if anyone can make this happen, I'd be happy to pay for the mod.

Re: Application Specific Mod: Are you interested?
 

Has anyone come up with an AAIA compliant search for XCART?

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.

Re: Application Specific Mod: Are you interested?
 

AMMoyer, Thanks for your insight surely helps to get input/suggestions.O:)

I already purchased BCS filter mod, so we'll see how that works.

We actually don't have the data anywhere but each product has it in descriptions so I guess it is somewhere in database.

I see your application module in work http://www.ingallseng.com/ies2004s-adjusting-sleeve.html
At one point I did start adding that info in "This part fits" extra field and than display it below the product. That takes a lot of time but it is one way to display that info in organized manner when there are so many models one single part fits.
I'm not very MYSQL savy so I would not know how to make products pull the data anyway.

On parts that fit only few models, I do clone and create new parts for now.

Once I get BCS mod and install I will report back.

Thanks.

Re: Application Specific Mod: Are you interested?
 

COUNT MY VOTE TOO FOR THIS (if anyone is listening:-))!

AMMoyer,
Your site looks awesome and works almost exactly as I want our site to work, as far as YMM lookup. You did all the mods yourself? Any way you could share some of your expertise with the rest of us?

How about for $?

I have no problem getting the data into the database. I regularly work with AAIA ACES and other fitment data from many different manufactures to import it into BlackThorne for use on eBay, so, I'm no stranger to the data.

Re: Application Specific Mod: Are you interested?
 

Wow, it has been almost 6 years now since the begining of this thread. Sad but it seems like none of the 3rd party developer has been able to come up with a good solution addressing the year/make/model/engine-size/etc. :(

AMMoyer: The vehicle lookup box at the top left corner of your site, is that your own codings or the BCS module being referred to?

Re: Application Specific Mod: Are you interested?
 

http://mods.x-cart.com/Make-Model-Year-feature.html ??

---

Re: Application Specific Mod: Are you interested?
 

The MMY lookup on our site is my coding.

The biggest obstacle most people will find is paying the subscription for the AAIA ACES tables. Without buying or creating your own vehicle data this is impossible. For those that aren't familiar with the ACES tables, they are a set of tables in a relational database that is constantly updated. Tons of info including all engine/transmission combinations, suspension type, brake type, wheelbase, body type, steering system, etc. Most companies do not need all of the available information but it is there. Vehicles covered go back 70+ years.

Here's how I handled the data I added to the MySQL database in our site. There are 4 tables, MMY, Make, Model, and Applications. The Make and Model table have only a list of Makes and Models to populate the dropdown boxes. The year dropdown is hardcoded with a list of years while the MMY table has all the combinations of vehicles that we have parts for. The MMY table is used to limit the Make choices and the Model choices based on what has been selected. I hate it when you drill down with your selections and get a no parts found. You could query this info out of one application table, but I did it this way to speed things up. I really wish I could get this to run with AJAX so the page wouldn't reload after each selection.

There are several examples of cascading combo boxes on the web to get started on the coding. The html for the boxes goes in a template and I put all my queries for the combo boxes in a separate PHP file. Here's an old thread from my 4.1.11 version that may help get you started.

Once the Year, Make and Model are selected and the from button is clicked a query is run on my applications table with a join to the search query in Xcart. See this post for this issue. Make sure your part numbers in your applications table match the productcode in XC. Have the parts the query finds dump into the products.tpl and you're set.

I've not considered developing a separate module for several reasons. Most XC users do not have access to the ACES tables and I don't have the expertise to make it a "canned" application and the market would be very small.

BTW, the integration I have done with 4.4.5 is much better than I pulled off with 4.1.11 Previously, I couldn't figure out how to integrate the MMY search with the XC search query and was missing a bunch of data in the products table, but it worked, mostly. It also was missing the navigation pages when more than 10 products were found. With 4.4.5 I had to get the integration to work otherwise the java for the buy it now buttons were unavailable.

Let me know and I'll try to help how I can.

Re: Application Specific Mod: Are you interested?
 

Thank you for the reply. Do you happen to know if this X-cart add-on mod allow additional filter parameters beside year, make and model? Can we add more filters like: Engine-Size, Cab-Size (regular, extended, crew cab) and bed-size? Thanks again!