Easy Populate, Pre-Orders, & Updating Stock

[Camarilladee]

Hi!

My business has been a very satisfied user of easy populate for some time now and zen-cart. We can't thank all of you who have put hard work into these projects, enough for your time and effort.

To my questions:

PRE-ORDERS & STOCK.
My site has 15,000+ items online (madhatterrgames.com) and we try to update weekly. Some of our items (as you might have guessed) aren't in store but are called in from warehouses around the country and thusly, may take time to ship out. More over, our warehouses send us a nice CSV file of all items they have in stock and those they will be getting soon (they don't always have dates on when, but they know they are coming soon.)

Because of this we have to list some items as "Pre-Orders" indicating to our customers that just as soon as they are available to us we will ship them out. However, the list of 'pre-orders' changes nearly daily (thousands of items somtimes) and while we have a program that compares which lines of products have changed status (ie: in stock, not in stock etc) comparing, deleteing and changing into a new easy populate format can take DAYS. Not very efficiant.

I need two things:

a. Is there a way to list items as "pre-order" other than working with the "date available" as we don't always know this info? I thought about setting an attribute for that but easy populate doesn't work very easily with attributes (or so I've found) ... anyone have ideas on this issue?

b. Does anyone know a good merging program that will notice differences between one file and another then merge the changed lines into the original document for upload?

[Camarilladee]

Anyone got any thoughts on this???

Please?

[ellivir]

I would also like to know if I can update my attribute stock quantities with Easy Populate somehow?
If I have the whole shop based on products with attributes and I have Attribute Stock module installed as well and also the Easy Populate works nicely to update product info but I would need to update the stock amounts for attributes as well.

By the way, I'm extremely surprised that the Attribute Stock was not yet officially released as standard in the new version of ZC. This Stock amounts in the standard version just doens't really work for the reality.

Elli

[Camarilladee]

I've been sitting here all week looking for an answer to this issue going "I can't be the only person/first person who's had this issue or who tried to find a solution to this problem" LOL.

Hopefully someone figured out it out before me though or I'm going to be really stuck.

[ellivir]

I've been sitting here all week looking for an answer to this issue going "I can't be the only person/first person who's had this issue or who tried to find a solution to this problem" LOL.

Hopefully someone figured out it out before me though or I'm going to be really stuck.

This lack of showing proper stock quantity with attributes somehow indeed kills the web shop idea: you can't even follow if you have two types of t-shirts in your storage with different sizes that how many you actually have of them. If you gladly install the Attribute Stock contribution and then you have the clever idea to finally fix with other than pen and paper your storage with the shop you have to do it manually, you can't simply use EP Module for uploading the info you may already have in your inventory list.

I start studying the idea of fixing this and when I will get the idea, I will ask somebody to make it to me since I'm not able of programming it. But all this will take so much time that I can't have it for this x-mas sales that it would be desperately needed.

Thumbs up, somebody else have some elaboration on this matter already!

Elli

[ellivir]

It seems that nobody else is interested in the matter.
I wonder if this stock amount approvement with attributes have been taking into consideration when developing ZC for next release. If that would be standard it would be easier to make things like EP module to work with it.

Elli

[Ajeh]

Attribute Stock is on the Road Map for Zen Cart ...

This is scheduled for v1.4 ...

[realforever]

I suggest we continue on this subject with bookeeping module thread