Looking for help with Inventory Management

[traytray]

If anybody knows of a mod, software, or some way I can do the following, please respond or PM me:

Automate the datafeed my dropshipper releases once a day, so my website has current inventory & pricing.

Ability to markup cost in dollar amount not percentage.

Include/exclude the products I want to carry, not ALL the products my dropshipper offers. I want to do this manually by selecting the product from a list, for example.

And come up with a plan to address Out Of Stock products. I’ll explain this further.

Ideally, I am looking for something that will not carry a monthly fee.

I'd be surprised if I was the only one that needed this. I've tried all sorts of Google searches and came up empty. There seems to be very sophisticated/very expensive products that do not fit my criteria. There is one place I use now that charges a monthly fee, but they cannot do the automation process in a timely manner, which leaves me a day behind on inventory and pricing for several hours each day. I can't believe there isn't something better out there.

Thank you!!!

[torvista]

I am (intermittently) working on creating my own feed from my legacy invoicing software database to update the inventory in my zc database. This uses Pentaho Data Integration (free) to pull out stock data directly from the legacy db, manipulate it and stick it straight into the Zen Cart db. Automatically.

You could do the same to your feed. You can make almost any type of manipulation to the incoming data, building up a transformation by adding simple step-by-step blocks until it meets your requirements.
It is, quite frankly, awesome, for anyone looking to manipulate data.