ZenCart: eCommerce Solution (Part 2 of 5)

by Steve Waugh | Wednesday, March 17th, 2010 at 6:25 pm

Once you’ve initially setup your Zen Cart installation you need to start thinking about the products you plan to sell on your website. You need to have a relationship with one or more vendors whose products you will feature and sell. You can even be your own vendor and sell unique products that you’ve designed yourself. Part 2 of this series focuses on setting up Zen Cart for product data import scripts.

I began the data import phase by searching for a Zen Cart import module. My search led me to Easy Populate, a non-commercial module to manage “CSV” data imports. This was a great discovery as the software saved me dozens of programming hours that would have been required to write and debug a custom made script. You will still need to write a script for each vendor in order to format the file exactly to the right specs. Again, this is still much simpler than connecting to multiple SQL tables with a custom script if you don’t already have something like this in your code toolbox.

So, for each vendor I create a custom PHP script to get the product and image data ready for import. The idea behind this is so that the website owners can later go in and perform these inventory updates on their own if they choose to to that route. Ultimately I plan to integrate the data import scripts seamlessly with the eCommerce site. In the end the owners or site administrators will simply need to browse to and upload the correct file and then click on the “Import” button.

Keep in mind that most vendors include product images separate from the actual product inventory. Vendors typically use the product or SKU as the name for each image. I had to request an image CD as well as FTP access in order to get all of the necessary information from each vendor. Then, I created vendor folder under the root images folder, and pointed to the correct image file location during the import.

Data imports do not require advanced knowledge or skills, however, I would not recommend this step to a casual user. You will need a firm understanding on database programming fundamentals. Also, you should be comfortable with the programming language constructs required to assemble a script file. This is a good area to spend money on professional help to ensure that the presentation of your eCommerce site products look good in your customers’ eyes.

Tags: database, import scripts, modules, zen cart

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