Product Importer/Updater PRO
 

We have an exciting new Prerelease for our new Product Importer/Updater PRO. Presale! Buy now and save $50! Target release date is August 1, 2008

This module so far is running super fast. We have done some beta testing with 160,000 products. It is importing these in 33 minutes! Our target is to be 50 products or more per second and we are currently doing imports 80 per second!! These tests though do not include the time it would take to download images if images do not exist.

This new product should do anything and everything you need for product importing and product updating. No more having to conform to a certain file standard to import! Our importer will virtually take any text file format and allow you to use it to import and update your products. You can even cron the system to auto pull down a file from a supplier and have it auto update your products for you.

Also you can import ALL of your product information in this one file. This includes all image information (multiple detailed images for each product, thumbnail, main image), wholesale prices, extra fields, product options, product variants, most 3rd party information and most custom columns in the products table.

We are also supporting most 3rd party modules!

Product Importer Pro support the following standard data formats including custom formats:

* Comma Separated Values (CSV)
* XML
* Tab Delimited File
* String Delimited File
* Regular Expression Delimited File
* Column Delimited File
* Other (custom delimited file)

You can find more information here:
http://www.bcsengineering.com/store/customer/product.php?productid=278&MMCF_xfPIP

Please feel free to ask questions here or email us at support with any questions.

Thank you!

Carrie

Re: Product Importer/Updater PRO
 

Wow..that looks really useful Carrie. Can you add new products through it? Also, can you choose to update products from a single manufacturer only?

Re: Product Importer/Updater PRO
 

Yes,

The whole purpose is to make it much easier to mass add products and mass update products. You can choose to import or update only sets of products at a time if you like. So yes you could upload a set from just a specific manufacturer.

You can upload as little or as much information as you want. The only requirements is if it is a new product, you must upload the minimum data that X-cart requires for a product to be added in the admin (so sku, product name, descriptions, etc). However on updating all you have to provide is the SKU and anything you want to update. You don't have to feed it all the fields during updating if you do not want to update those fields.

You can also add AND update products in one file feed. If a sku exists, the system auto updates that product with the info provided in the file feed you give it, if it does not exist, it will add that product.

Let me know if you have more questions!

Thanks,

Carrie

Re: Product Importer/Updater PRO
 

Carrie,

Has this been released yet? I pre-ordered back in July and I know it was running a little behind schedule. We really need to get this set up to bring in a supplier in time for Halloween sales.

-Preston

Re: Product Importer/Updater PRO
 

Yes we were doing some final testing last week. We should have the first release later today or tomorrow. We've done some silent releasing with the testing so we are at about 1.0.3 or 1.0.4 I believe.

We'll update you later today or early tomorrow.

Thank you!

Carrie

Re: Product Importer/Updater PRO
 

Just an update that we will be doing an export of this module tonight to have it ready to ship out tomorrow to those that ordered it without configuration.

Thanks,

Carrie

Re: Product Importer/Updater PRO
 

I'm curious, do you allow linking of tables in the X-Cart database for data import?

For example, while the old CDSEO mod and older versions of XCSEO Pro added a new column to the xcart_products table, both CDSEO Pro and XCSEO Pro currently have their URL data stored in a separate table (which is central to Category, Product, Manufacturer, and Static Page urls).

So, with your product, is it possible to construct a JOIN between xcart_products and xcart_phpss_xcseo to update the XCSEO fields related to the product that is being updated?


If not, that's fine, but if so, then that's pretty damn cool ;-)

Re: Product Importer/Updater PRO
 

For right now, it does not allow mapping to *new* tables such as this. It will see new columns in the products table, but not new sub-product tables that are non-xcart standard.

However. We do like to be very compatible with the popular 3rd party modules out there. So we certainly can look at making it compatible with yours and Jon's modules as it would be very convenient for our customers. Drop us an email with any details we need to know and we can schedule it for a future release or possibly an addon to the module.

Anyone seeing this wanting their Product Importer Pro compatible with either CDSEO Pro or XCSEO Pro please email us at "support" or use our contact us form. The more requests we get usually the faster we can put changes into the code.

Thanks,

Carrie

P.S. Those waiting for it the module that did not choose the configure option will be receiving it today. We've put some more features in it and wanted to get that in there before releasing. So please contact us if you do not see the zip come in today (incase it goes to your spam folder, etc).

Re: Product Importer/Updater PRO
 

Hi guys,

We are in the process of moving to Xcart 4.2 purely because one of our suppliers has thousands of products available for drop ship as well as the usual lines we buy and stock our selves.

So, as an Xcart noob could you tell me if the following is possible with your software? We set up a seperate provider in our store and load on the drop ship products. We then need some software which will poll a file over ftp, I think every 10 minutes as they want stock levels to be highly accurate to avoid over-selling. There are a lot of stores accessing this inventory so it's important that all those stores have accurate stock levels.

So, will your product be able to do regular updates from a stock file stored on a remote server somewhere at the other end of the UK?

Thanks

Re: Product Importer/Updater PRO
 

Yes it will pull a file over FTP to update the products. It can update how ever often as you like. The only thing you need to keep in mind is if its a huge number of products, you'll want the update to be done before it runs again. It does have some locking with it so that you cannot run it too often and stomp on itself. You'll just have to keep in mind your data. If it's like 100,000 products, it will take longer to update than a few thousand. Or if it's a complicated update rather than just a simple price, quantity update then it will take more time.

Feel free to email us a sample file that you want to update with and we can evaluate how easy it will be to integrate. Some more complicated files will require some php coding to translate what you get from your supplier into something X-cart can use. Some common fields that have php programming done:
1. price from supplier needs to be marked up
2. Categories from supplier are not the categories you want to display your products in.

Thank you,

Carrie

Re: Product Importer/Updater PRO
 

Thanks Carrie,

It's good to know there is somebody out there who can assist with this. We are some way off actually getting this running. First step is to migrate our own site over from Actinic to X-Cart and get our own products selling plus integrating into our back end software.

Once we are ready to persue this I will get in touch and hopefully your company can assist us with the supplier integration.

Steve

Re: Product Importer/Updater PRO
 

Steve,

Sounds fine. Just let us know if you need help with the other stuff. We've worked with X-cart since 2002 and also do customizations and X-cart support.

Good luck!

Thanks,

Carrie

Re: Product Importer/Updater PRO
 

I have a database of around 1300 products and I want to add a couple of hundred more. I want to add these products without overwriting the existing products.

If my understanding is correct (it may not be!) the standard x-cart export/import involves exporting existing data, adding new products to spreadsheet in correct format and then importing. The import overwrites the existing db with the new data.

What I'd like to do is essentially a table update rather than what I assume is a drop/create table that the standard x-cart export import uses. Will this tool help?

Re: Product Importer/Updater PRO
 

Yes as far as I know you are correct, the X-cart importer will overwrite what's there.

Ours however you can set it to just update instead. It's keyed off product SKU. So if it finds a product SKU that matches in the database, it will update any information you feed it through the feed.

We find a lot of people rather use this tool for updating as they already have their products in the cart previously if they are not a new site.

Feel free to drop us an email if you have more questions.

Thanks,

Carrie

Re: Product Importer/Updater PRO
 

Ideally what I want to do is take a new bunch of products and add them to x-cart without doing anything to the existing ones. Ideally I'd also like the existing products to be ignored by the update without me having to do anything in the tool I use for this.

Think of it as an update in SQL which would simply add any new products to the existing product list. I'd be interested in this tool if it can do this but ideally the opportunity to try it out before buying would help. If it was a $30 add on I'd just buy it but at $200 I don't want to buy unless it does the job.

Have you got a test version of x-cart somewhere that I could try it out on?

Re: Product Importer/Updater PRO
 

Sure we could customize it a bit to make it only do new products and never updates. It's meant to do both automatically at the same time. But we could make a prescript that tells it to skip a product if it already exists.

Unfortunately this is one that we can't have someone test out on our servers for security reasons. You can put php code into the fields and it can execute any php code you tell it to when configuring it, which poses a security risk. If you would like to email us your file we can let you know how hard or easy it would be to configure the module to work with your file.

We can let you know how much it would be to modify it to skip any pre-existing products as well then.

Thank you,

Carrie

Re: Product Importer/Updater PRO
 

I'm very interested in this.

I installed your test script and i can't see to get it working. my host is useless.
path to php is correct (according to phpinfo() )

$php_cmd ("/usr/local/lib/php-5.2.4/") did not return success. (return value was 126).

what does that mean?

Re: Product Importer/Updater PRO
 

It simply means the path to php isn't correct. Probably best to drop us an email if you haven't already. The path to php usually is
/usr/local/bin/
/usr/bin/
/usr/sbin/
etc.

If you're host is useless then you might want to get another one :D There are plenty of great hosting companies on this forum including us for reasonable prices. I don't think of any case where we've had a client that claimed their host was useless that they didn't get eventually burnt by them.

Thanks,

Carrie

Re: Product Importer/Updater PRO
 

Unfortunately, it's a client website... I don't have a choice over where it's hosted. I've tried all variations of those paths

php info says:
Configure Command './configure' '--prefix=/usr/local/lib/php-5.2.4' '


I'll shoot you guys an email in th emorning.

Re: Product Importer/Updater PRO
 

Hi Carrie. I am very interested in this "Product Importer Updater Pro" add-on module. How far out before this add-on get updated for the xcart 4.3 release? Can you give me a ballpark time frame? Thanks!

Re: Product Importer/Updater PRO
 

We do upgrades to 4.3.x as requested. Drop us an email so we can get it on our schedule. Email support@

Thanks,

Carrie

Re: Product Importer/Updater PRO
 

Thanks for the reply, Carrie.

If I go ahead and purchase this add-on for the current Xcart version 4.1.x or 4.2.x now, Would you be able to send me the new version when you have this add-on updated for the 4.3.x release? I just wanted to know if that updated version would be available before my "3 months upgrades" period is up. Thank you.

Re: Product Importer/Updater PRO
 

There would just be a small 25% of the price of the mod fee to upgrade. This covers the cost of upgrading and all the new features we're continually putting into our software.

Thanks,

Carrie

Re: Product Importer/Updater PRO
 

Hi Carrie. I have went ahead and purchased your Product Importer module on 12/07 (Order #17630). Can you please email me the instruction on how to install this model on the Xcart 4.3 site? Thank you!

Re: Product Importer/Updater PRO
 

I'm currently out of town on vacation. If you could please email us a support ticket someone will be able to get back to you. I don't think this module has been tested on 4.3.x yet. Looks like you bought it for 4.1.x

Thank you,

Carrie

Re: Product Importer/Updater PRO
 

Does anyone know of a mod similar to this, only not this mod? I have sent two requests to BCSE to clarify some questions and I have not had a response. I am not comfortable having them install this mod is they won't communicate. Is there anything similar?

Re: Product Importer/Updater PRO
 

Please note we've been having a ton of snow here and have been low staffed on top of the holidays. Please let me know what the ticket number is and we'll get back to you.

Thanks,

Carrie

Re: Product Importer/Updater PRO
 

Just FYI, I can't find any correspondence from a domain named cjtdigital.com So maybe we didn't get your emails. Just let us know. Either drop your first 3 of your ticket number here or email support@ and I'll let Gary know to look for your message.

Thank you,

Carrie

Re: Product Importer/Updater PRO
 

Carrie, there was no ticket number. I sent two messages through your contact form on your website. I need to know how you will communicate with my client to map their import/export if I buy the installation of the product importer/updater. Email? Phone?

Pat

Re: Product Importer/Updater PRO
 

Pat,

You should have gotten an auto response back with a ticket number if you used a contact form on our website. It seems like we didn't get it. Could you email us at support with your questions?

We prefer email communications for most things, as it leaves a nice written record for both of us to refer back to as to what work needs to be done. We can schedule a phone call if needed to clear some things up, but a follow up email after the phone call summarizing the call is best so we know we're both on the same page and have the important parts of the conversation in email.

Let me know if you don't get a response from our ticket system when emailing us directly to support. You should auto get a ticket number back.

Thank you,

Carrie

Re: Product Importer/Updater PRO
 

I have emailed you through your support system. I have a ticket number but so far no confirmation email. I hope you get my support request. I really need this mod.

Re: Product Importer/Updater PRO
 

Thanks for letting us know! I have found your tickets and see that we've replied to all of them so far. Can you make sure your spam filter isn't gobbling up our responses? Please add support@ to your allow list. You can also always log in to our support system to see our responses.

Thank you,
Carrie

Re: Product Importer/Updater PRO
 

Hi Carrie. Is there a user manual for this "Product Importer" module? I followed the readme.txt and completed the installation. However, I did not see a user manual file or instruction. Is it available in a file some where that I may have overlooked? Thanks!

Re: Product Importer/Updater PRO
 

You can find our documentation here:
http://bcsengineering.com/documentation/

We do need to revamp the Importer one and add some more stuff to it possibly. So if your questions are not answered by it, drop us an email and we'll see if we can either just help for your particular case or if it's something that needs to be added.

Thanks,

Carrie

Re: Product Importer/Updater PRO
 

Hi Carrie,
I had my import process modified to skip over missing images (timeout skip).
Will this still work with this mod?

Re: Product Importer/Updater PRO
 

Our importer is completely separate from X-carts. So changes to X-cart's importer won't effect ours.

Ours will not die if there are any issues with an individual product. It will simply just skip that product if it does not have enough information to create the product and it will log it to a log file for later reference. Images are not necessary to create a product, so it will just update/create the product and move on without the image.

The fields that are required to create a product are:
productcode (sku)
product (product title/name)
forsale
category
price

If you simply want to use it to update prices, quantities, etc all you need is the productcode column and then what ever field you want to update.

I hope that helps. It's highly configurable. If you have a simple file though, configuring it is easy. If you have more complicated needs (for example you need column 2 combined with column 5 to create your category path) then you might want to have us review it to quote configuring it unless you're good at php coding.

Let us know though if you have more questions.

Thanks,

Carrie

Re: Product Importer/Updater PRO
 

Hi Carrie,

I followed the instruction listed on your site to install the Product Importer module. http://bcsengineering.com/documentation/product_importer_updater.shtml

After that, tried a test import but it didn't go through. It gave me the error message "'C:\WebApps\MyWebSite/var/log/pip_1264484573.log'". So I downloaded the "Test_Site.php" file and ran it. That gave me the message: Warning! Product Importer Pro has not been tested on the Windows operating system. $php_cmd (php) did not return success. (return value was 1).

I have sent in a support ticket with the server login details. [#UBG-177601]. Can you take a look and let me know if this is something can be fixed? I must have overlooked about your note regarding to the Windows Server issues.....Thanks so much for your help!

Re: Product Importer/Updater PRO
 

Thanks for the info! I've been *really* ill the past several days. But Gary should be looking into this for you. He will be in and out of the office for the next 3 days though due to his wife having to go through some procedures in the hospital. Just drop us a reply back in that ticket if the matter is urgent so we can properly prioritize. We're running a bit thin as it seems the flu is running through our city and office unfortunately. We had someone else out as well today due to being ill.

Thanks,

Carrie

Re: Product Importer/Updater PRO
 

Hi Carrie. How are you? Hopefully everything is going well. Can you let us know if this Product Importer add-on would be available for Xcart 4.4 platform over the next couple months? Thanks!

Re: Product Importer/Updater PRO
 

Does anyone know how long after an order is placed that BCSE will start work on Configuring this mod if we were to pay the additional $300 for that option?

We are in a hurry to get this set up and wanted to find out a timeframe.

Thanks