Importing from an external dropship site

[Tiigaan]

I was wondering if anyone could point me in te right direction.

I use a dropship site which states on their page this:

Product Population

If you have just installed one of the popular shopping cart software packages, you can use the following links to download the basic data needed to load our products into your databases. We've mapped our products onto the basic tables, which should give you enough information to start your site going. Initially we'll be covering OSCommerce, Zen Cart and XCart but over time we'll add more applications to ensure we can help anyone setting up their site for the first time.

Now I have d/l these links and they are in .csv format but I am unsure where I have to put them now to get them on my shop or am I reading it wrong and they don't actually go on a database it is just information for me to use.

Sorry for being a bit dumb today.

[bunyip]

You'll need to use phpmyadmin (or another database manager) to load the csv files into the database. Phpmyadmin is usually available on your hosting control panel

[amdowney]

Is it possible then to import in PHPMyadmin a file edited in excel which has only 2 columns (the id & stock level) to update a table? And How?? Thank u!

[bunyip]

Yes, it is possible to do with a little work on the Excel file.
Assume you have the product ID in column A, and the stock level in column B. I'll assume you have column titles in the first row, and the first data fields are in row 2.
In the second row of column C, enter this formula:

=CONCATENATE("UPDATE TABLE products SET products_quantity = ",B2," WHERE products_id = ",A2,";")

Then copy that formula and paste it into the rest of the column C rows.

Now you can just select the whole of column C, and either paste it into your Admin > Tools > Install SQL Patches page, or paste it into a blank text file that you can then import into either phpmyadmin or the Admin > Install SQL Patches page.

Note: if you have a prefix on your tables and plan to import the file via phpmyadmin, you will need to add the prefix into that formula in Excel. If you plan to use the Admin SQL patch page, do NOT add the table prefix, as it gets added automatically by the cart.

[mm99]

hi
this is something i was looking for long time.i have v- products_model and v_products_quantity.can i update quantity of stock with that formula?
thanks in advance for your help

[bunyip]

you should be able to do it in exactly the same fashion - exchanging products_model for products_id in the formula.
However - no guarantees - try it on a test database/store first and make a backup of your live store database before running the sql script there.

[mm99]

Perfect.yes its working .thank you very much

[amdowney]

Thank you Bunyip

[schoolboy]

If you are able to grab your supplier's product data as a csv file or even a MS Excel spreadsheet, the easiest way to load it into your database is to use EasyPopulate.

If you are using Zencart version 1.3.xxx (including 1.3.8a) then the version of EP you need is 1.2.5.4 available from Langer's Modhole (www.modhole.com - follow links to Easy Populate Standard).

If your supplier provides a list of image url's, the easiest way to get all the images is to use wget. This program automatically downloads all the images from the remote site to your hard drive.

Your supplier's spreadsheet is likely to have a column that lists the paths to the images - something like:

http://www.supplier.com/images/1234567.jpg
http://www.supplier.com/images/2345678.jpg
http://www.supplier.com/images/3456789.jpg

Copy this column and paste it into a plain text editor (notepad++), then save it as a .txt file .

Save this file in the root (c:) of your hard drive.

(We used this last night to grab over 4000 images - took 30 minutes).

Get wget from:-

http://sourceforge.net/project/downl...se_mirror=garr

install it

open a cmd prompt e.g. start | run | type: cmd
in the command prompt type cd.. press enter

type this again till you get to just the c:

(The program may be located in a BIN folder, and if so, the likely path will be: C:\Program Files\GnuWin32\bin. At the c: prompt, type cd Program Files\GnuWin32\bin)

When you reach this location...

type wget -i c:\textfile.txt (replace textfile.txt with the name of the textfile you created)

let it run till it downloads all your images. (They will be located in the bin folder, so later you can move them to another folder).

you will now have a folder with all the images as they were on the remote server.

You can then FTP the images to your own server.

[djcr]

Is there a manual anywhere that explains what fields Zen Cart requires for a product or category import?

I've a CSV file from a drop shipping supplier and need to bring this into my cart, through whatever method, but need to make sure that the fields tally.

Thanks