Updating product info from a 3rd party listing service

[lakecountrybooks]

I haven't taken the plunge yet to try to start building a Zen Cart store - I'm just exploring the possibility.

I sell books/media and use a 3rd party listing service to manage my inventory, handle my pricing, link my images, etc. I currently push this information to 7 different e-commerce sites. The service also pulls order information from all these sites and consolidates it in one spot for me.

I'm able to add custom venues to this service, and am able to do FTP uploads of my inventory information (including updates) in a tab-delimited format.

My question for this forum is - does anybody here do anything similar - manage their inventory and order information outside of Zen Cart using FTP transfers? I currently have an eBay store, and the service I use integrates with that. Zen Cart seems to be, on the surface, somewhat similar.

Thanks in advance for your help. I have about 2000 items in inventory, so if I make this leap it will be a big undertaking.

Oh, and if anyone here is using Zen Cart to sell books - I'd love to see your store!

[kobra]

Not to tell you your business....but 7 stores and one inventory that is not dynamically linked so that you never know if you have the inventory to sell or not...I do not envy you.

More pertinent things, there are more eloquent ways to do the data than csv file up/off loads. I do not know if you maintain the master inventory DB or not it sounds like you employ a service for this.

2,000 items is not an issue...one of the developers of ZenCart has an inventory on the order of 70,000 items.

You can search this forum for book and see several posts about and from others selling books/media. There is also a module that creates a "product type" geared for books.

[lakecountrybooks]

....but 7 stores and one inventory that is not dynamically linked so that you never know if you have the inventory to sell or not...I do not envy you.

In the interest of brevity, I didn't explain that the listing service I use maintains my inventory, so if an item is sold on one site, it is deleted off the competing sites, usually in a half an hour or less. Because this is a highly-competitive industry, and it typically takes a month (sometimes 2 years) for an item to sell, 1/2 hour processing time is more than adequate. It maintains my database of inventory for me, tracks my cost and source of each item, provides financial reports, will allow for automatic repricing based on competitors' listings using my own personalized script, and much more. It works great. So yes, I ALWAYS know if I have the inventory to sell our not.

Because I fully expect to continue selling on these other sites (my own personal web site is not going to begin to compete with or get the traffic of Amazon.com, for example), if I am going to use Zen Cart, I need to stay with this system. Which means .csv uploads are what I have to work with.

I did search the forums for book sellers but came up with very little. I did find one that I sent an e-mail off to last night, but she is just beginning to set up her site. I was hoping to find an active, working site built with Zen Cart.

It's good to know about the "product type" module for books. I will check into that.