Updating Product Availability : Added - Beta 1.7.8.1

Started by jabrein, June 09, 2015, 12:42:16 PM

Previous topic - Next topic

jabrein

Hi David,

I was wondering if you knew whether an existing solution exists for the following need.

We sell a lot of pre-order products with future release dates.    We use the SM email templates to send out emails to customers who purchase a pre-order item, ensuring that they are aware of the Availability date (using the Product Availability field dynamically within the email template).

As time passes, some of these release dates may change.   We make these changes in our Yahoo Store Product Catalog.    Examples of some changes include an item's release moving further out,  an item moving up its release date, and an item being received within the next week.

We then apprise our customers of these changes once again through the SM Email Template.

The only way I (we) know how to update Product Availability within SuperManager is to Import every single item in our Product Catalog.  (We are close to having 200,000 skus/subskus in our catalog).   This process takes a significant amount of time (today it took nearly 6 hours).     It seems like a waste of of updates when the quantity of changed Availability is probably always < 100 skus.

Is there a different way that we can achieve this update to continue to use our Dynamic SM email template?     

Just brainstorming on my end, but it would be great if there was a way to only pull in Products that meet certain criteria  (e.g.  Items where an order exists, but the item has not shipped).       Or, only pulling in updates for a specific Product Field  (availability).

LMK if you have any ideas on your end!   Or, if something already exists that I am unaware.

Thanks!
Jeff

David Johns

Jeff,

I did some benchmarking to see why it takes so long.  I thought it might be that the majority of the time was in comparing the old products to the newly downloaded products.  That is, in fact, the vast majority of the time.  However, at least in debug mode on my development computer it looked like it would take ~1.5 minutes to download and load the file, then about 83 minutes to parse the 52,135 products.  I didn't let it run the full time even to do that and didn't want to let it run out to complete the whole process.  I just  it would take the remaining ~4.5 hours to do the comparison.

Point of the matter is that the way SuperManager is accessing the file simply wasn't designed for efficient handling of this number of products.  Don't misunderstand what I mean by that, however.  I don't know that there is a better way to do it with what SuperManager has available to do it with.  There's a chance that we could look at other XML reading libraries that may be more efficient, but it will likely still take a long time to parse the size of file it has to work with (126 MB file, by the way).

We do have some options.  At the time this approach was adopted for importing product lists the Yahoo Catalog API was not available.  It is possible that we could implement support for it so that you could right click on selected product(s) and choose "Update from Shopping Cart".  We could also implement a function to right click on selected order(s) and choose "Find Products" to open a list of products in that order on the product list.  In this way you could use the find products function to generate a list of products in a set of orders, select them all, then right click and choose "Update from Shopping Cart" to pull them in.

I'll contact you offline to scope out something like that.

Thanks,
David

SuperManager Support
info@thesupermanager.com

David Johns

Jeff,

We now have a beta release available that contains the ability to download individual products (or the entire list) through the API.  Update to beta 1.7.8.2 and switch your store type in under "View", "Store Settings" to "Luminate API Beta".  Then you can right click on a product or products on the products screen and choose "Update from Store Manager".  Let us know how it works for you.

Thanks,
David
SuperManager Support
info@thesupermanager.com