Okay, to make a story little bit shorter here is the previous thread http://www.zen-cart.com/forum/showthread.php?t=188401

What I need to do is to add thousands of products to the catalog. I got manufacturers pricing spread sheets, which I can reformat to import them into the database. Here's the question... ARI(check previous thread) using SKU, in our case it should be products_id. Some of them are just numbers, but some of them are numbers and letters for expample NN10798. Is it possible to use letters and numbers in product_id field in database?
So the link would look like this
website.com/index.php?action=buy_now&products_id=NN10798

Or is there any other way the product could be added to the shopping cart without using products_id?

I would appreciate any help and suggestions.