Apsona ShopAdmin - a free tool for import/mass update/reporting

I would guess that at some point it will become subscription-based.
Good luck to them for providing such useful tools and excellent support.
Note they they can also do personalised features as part of the stock application for your account only if you need something really site-specific.

My hosts (UKFast) disabled my account after a month of using Apsona. For reasons associated with the same Mumbai, Indian IP range that Apsona uses to take your data to and from your PC to your websever, coincidence?

Thanks to Apsona for a really fantastic admin, it's the easiest way ever to increase my sales, all my sales are multiplied by 100 ...

well, it's all got to do with the '.' and ',' of course, I live in Belgium where we use the ',' and not the '.' for decimal, how do I set this in Apsona ?

also, I would like to translate Apsona to dutch, where can I find the files for the translation ?

Fons

ray-the-otter:

My hosts (UKFast) disabled my account after a month of using Apsona. For reasons associated with the same Mumbai, Indian IP range that Apsona uses to take your data to and from your PC to your websever, coincidence?

I'm not sure I understand what this is about. Apsona does not use any external servers for data movement - it simply moves data from your server to your browser. Can you please explain? Where does Mumbai figure in this picture?

ray-the-otter:

My hosts (UKFast) disabled my account after a month of using Apsona. For reasons associated with the same Mumbai, Indian IP range that Apsona uses to take your data to and from your PC to your websever, coincidence?

apsona:

I'm not sure I understand what this is about. Apsona does not use any external servers for data movement - it simply moves data from your server to your browser. Can you please explain? Where does Mumbai figure in this picture?

Curious myself to hear how anyone came up with this conclusion.. Have they NOT seen this thread, looked at the application or read the documentation on the Apsona website:

ShopAdmin communicates directly with your shopping cart's database via the ShopAdmin add-on, a thin layer of PHP code that resides within your shopping cart. (We will provide this add-on for you when you sign up.) The ShopAdmin UI component provides a rich, powerful and easy-to-use interface in your browser, and commmunicates with the ShopAdmin add-on to show your data. You can find more details here.

I sent several emails to Apsona support regarding this in attempts to get a dialog going with myself and my hosts. No response was ever received. Regardless of what your website states or the methods of communications or the US location of Apsona, when I used the Apsona add-on, traffic to and from my site was routed to a blacklisted IP address. The location of which is Mumbai, India. My account was suspended because of the phenomenal volume of traffic their spam systems were blocking on the shared server from the set of IPs my host said my scripts were communicating with. After convincing them that I had no idea what was happening, they subsequently asked me to either removed the offending php file (one of the Apsona php files supplied) or find a new host.

There is a lot more I could say publicly, but nothing I have not said privately to support.

ray-the-otter:

I sent several emails to Apsona support regarding this in attempts to get a dialog going with myself and my hosts. No response was ever received. Regardless of what your website states or the methods of communications or the US location of Apsona, when I used the Apsona add-on, traffic to and from my site was routed to a blacklisted IP address. The location of which is Mumbai, India. My account was suspended because of the phenomenal volume of traffic their spam systems were blocking on the shared server from the set of IPs my host said my scripts were communicating with. After convincing them that I had no idea what was happening, they subsequently asked me to either removed the offending php file (one of the Apsona php files supplied) or find a new host.

There is a lot more I could say publicly, but nothing I have not said privately to support.

This is certainly very strange, because it is the first time I'm hearing of this. I'm the one that handles all of Apsona's emails. There were a few emails quite a while ago asking our privacy policies, and I'm sure I responded to them. Are you sure you sent the emails to support at apsona.com?

As for the add-on misbehaving, that's a serious matter. We do everything we can to ensure the quality of our software, and I would be very surprised (to say the least) if it misbehaves the way you assert. Perhaps you can furnish the technical details of the URLs, the files in question and the IP addresses of the hosts involved in this alleged spamming? That way we can get to the bottom of it.

Regards.

fonzie:

Thanks to Apsona for a really fantastic admin, it's the easiest way ever to increase my sales, all my sales are multiplied by 100 ...

well, it's all got to do with the '.' and ',' of course, I live in Belgium where we use the ',' and not the '.' for decimal, how do I set this in Apsona ?

also, I would like to translate Apsona to dutch, where can I find the files for the translation ?

Fons

We just pushed out (last week) an update that should support locale-specific number formatting, and the Belgian (BE) and Dutch (NL) formats are both included there. Are you still having this problem? If so, are you by any chance using a browser that is configured as English rather than Dutch?

If not, please let us know, and we'll investigate further.

The translation is a nontrivial effort, and we're still working on creating a vocabulary. We'll let you know as soon as that's done. Thanks for your interest!

Regards.

apsona:

Hi Lisa,

This is the first such issue we've heard of with mod_security from among all the thirty or so hosting companies that have deployed and used ShopAdmin, so I'm tempted to ask what is special about this particular hosting company's configuration that causes this problem. I'd love to hear the inputs from other folks on this forum - particularly the hosting companies - on this issue.

In any case, it would be great if your hosting company can furnish us technical details about exactly what kinds of behavior causes the security error. This would help us isolate the issue and look into what it would take to recode the script. From what I'm seeing, the error is triggered by your hosting company every time an insert SQL statement is executed from the script, and that seems to be too severe a restriction.

Hope this helps.

Hi, I love this program but after working with my host they have told me I cannot use this program. I have tried emailing support but my emails are being bounced back? If Apsona could email me I will forward my host's emails with their concerns!!!

Simmons:

Hi, I love this program but after working with my host they have told me I cannot use this program. I have tried emailing support but my emails are being bounced back? If Apsona could email me I will forward my host's emails with their concerns!!!

I've sent you an email.

Regards.

We just pushed out (last week) an update that should support locale-specific number formatting, and the Belgian (BE) and Dutch (NL) formats are both included there. Are you still having this problem? If so, are you by any chance using a browser that is configured as English rather than Dutch?

If not, please let us know, and we'll investigate further.

Hello,

I'm still having the same problem with the decimal '.' and ',', I just uploaded 100 new items with Apsona, most of them are just 1,00 euro, and all went well, but when I look at them in Apsona, the price is 10.000,00 euro, I would love to sell them at that price, but I'm afraid it's wishful thinking ..

All the prices in the shop are correct, but not in the shopadmin,

Fons

fonzie - thanks for the bug report. We've found the problem, and a fix will be rolled out in the next few days.

Regards.

apsona:

I'm not sure I fully understand the way admin profiles works, but the SQL is definitely incorrect. The admin profiles add-on should be checking for the page named apsona_index.php, but instead it is page named this:

#" title="Apsona ShopAdmin - opens in new window" onclick="apsona_showPopup('apsona_index');

> 
> To me this seems like an error in the way the admin profiles add-on was configured. I am aware of some other folks on this forum that have used admin profiles in conjunction with ShopAdmin, so I hope one of them can help.
> 
> Regards.

I never did get to the bottom of my problem from [post 154](http://www.zen-cart.com/forum/showpost.php?p=977950&postcount=154). Is anyone currently running Apsona with Admin Profiles V1.1.1 on Zen V1.3.9h without any problems?

At least that way I know it does work and there is an answer out there and I will keep digging.

Many thanks

Brent

PS. Apsona, Did you receive my email of 03/01/2011? It contained all the files to replicate this error.

Brent - I don't think we received these files. Can you please send them again, to support at apsona.com?

Thanks.

apsona:

Brent - I don't think we received these files. Can you please send them again, to support at apsona.com?

Thanks.Thanks for getting back to me. I've just resent the email.

Kind regards,

Brent

I don’t know that this is a bug with Apsona, but some of my product don’t show a picture until I open the product for editing and update.

Then with others I’ll have to copy the same image name showing for the product into:
“select an existing image file from server, filename:” and update, then it shows.

Any ideas?

gxjenkins:

I don’t know that this is a bug with Apsona, but some of my product don’t show a picture until I open the product for editing and update.

Then with others I’ll have to copy the same image name showing for the product into:
“select an existing image file from server, filename:” and update, then it shows.

Any ideas?

O.K. this was defiantly not a problem with Apsona.
I don’t know how I did it, but somehow I managed to screw up that upload.
Maybe there was an extra space in the file name when I edited the spreadsheet (most likely), or some other reason Zencart didn’t recognize the file name until I copied it to use this file name on server.

I did upload another 200 products today all without a problem.

I do have a suggestion. I’ve mentioned it in Feedback, but I don’t know if it will be added, or not.
When you export your Products, there is lots of information. To make this module even more useful to those sending there products to Google, if the export included:
The url to the Product
The url to the image
The Category Name instead of the number

gxjenkins:

O.K. this was defiantly not a problem with Apsona.
I don’t know how I did it, but somehow I managed to screw up that upload.
Maybe there was an extra space in the file name when I edited the spreadsheet (most likely), or some other reason Zencart didn’t recognize the file name until I copied it to use this file name on server.

I did upload another 200 products today all without a problem.

I do have a suggestion. I’ve mentioned it in Feedback, but I don’t know if it will be added, or not.
When you export your Products, there is lots of information. To make this module even more useful to those sending there products to Google, if the export included:
The url to the Product
The url to the image
The Category Name instead of the number

Thanks for this update, it definitely helps. As for your feature requests:

• The product URL is generated internally by Zen Cart. But perhaps you mean that you use one of the add-ons for SEO-friendly URLs, such as CEON?
• The image URL is also generated internally by Zen Cart, as far as I know. ShopAdmin sees only what's in the database. All the same, we're open to suggestions on how this could be improved.
• You're implying that it exports the category number when exporting products? I wonder if you have an outdated version of the ShopAdmin add-on. If you have the current one, it should show category names when exporting products. Please clarify.

Regards.

apsona:

Thanks for this update, it definitely helps. As for your feature requests:

• The product URL is generated internally by Zen Cart. But perhaps you mean that you use one of the add-ons for SEO-friendly URLs, such as CEON?

• The image URL is also generated internally by Zen Cart, as far as I know. ShopAdmin sees only what's in the database. All the same, we're open to suggestions on how this could be improved.

• You're implying that it exports the category number when exporting products? I wonder if you have an outdated version of the ShopAdmin add-on. If you have the current one, it should show category names when exporting products. Please clarify.

Regards.

Yes, when I export my products the category, and master category shows up as a numbers.
I installed Apsona on Jan. 10th. How can I tell what version I’m using? Since I’m not using Export for anything right now, its not a big deal.

I would normally use Easy Populate to produce the file to upload to Google, but I can’t remember how to add the UPC/ISBN fields. Its been a few years since I did it.

The changes I suggested may not be necessary after all.

I tried my first upload to Google today, and just over 1100 items were accepted out of 1400. I used Google Base Feeder which produces a xml file and I don’t like using them because I’m more comfortable with a CVS spreadsheet. I think its easier to spot and correct mistakes in the file. Its the first time I’ve used Google Base Feeder, and I wanted to see what would happen.

Since Google accepted the upload and they didn’t send me any hate mail (not yet anyway) I’ll just use this method for now.

Thanks,

Hello folks,

If you run a multi-lingual cart, you might be interested to know that ShopAdmin now supports nine languages other than English: Czech, Danish, German, Spanish, French, Italian, Dutch, Norwegian and Swedish. The translation should kick in when you change the language selector menu at the top right of your ShopAdmin window. (That menu will only appear if your cart is multi-lingual.)

The translation is only partial, and it's done via Google Translate, so there are probably a lot of inaccuracies. All the same, we'd love to know what you think of it. Comments/feedback/criticism most welcome.

Regards.