How to Import Data?

[Lizard Liver]

We are attempting to put products from a music, video and apparel store online utilizing ZenCart. We have a database of which we use around 20 fields of data from. Some of the columns or fields could be removed but some are extremely critical like format, artist, title, UPC. street date, quantity, and last order date and so forth are important. Can Zen Cart be configured to utilize these additional fields? And if so how? Your attention is appreciated.

[kuroi]

Zen Cart can handle it. It allows you to define your own product types together with handlers for maintaining information in the Admin and your own product information display pages for the catalog.

Unfortunately the documentation on this is rather sparse, being mostly contained within a single Wiki entry.

[Lizard Liver]

Thank you very much. I will digest this wiki and make sure my programmer reads as well. As we have over 50,000 items in our database alone and can get more extensive data from our vendors. I am curious to how we might automate populating our data tables on the site. I cannot fathom inputing each record individually. Plus selling music pretty much requires that you be able to sort and search at least by format, genre, artist, title and so forth. Label or Music company as you call it is important but not as critical as say UPC code. I do appreciate your response. Thank you.

[kuroi]

There's an add-in module called Easy Populate for bulk uploads, but it I don't believe that it can handle custom fields, though it would be worth checking with the author.

Otherwise for 50,000 records, especially if you will be updating them regularly, it would be worth building your own upload (we did this for a client recently and it was nowhere near as difficult as it sounds). All you need to know really is how the product tables link together (again there's information in the wiki) and what they contain and you can bypass Zen Cart to put your data straight into the database.

[Lizard Liver]

I have been considering EP. Haven't gotten that far yet. Do own and am reading the Book by Ken. I do have a programmer who is reading Harry Potter right now. You have obviously been down this path before. I would certainly like to save us all the time and hassel of slogging through it and was curious about rates a firm such as yours might require for such an endeavour? Your attention is appreciated.