We can set up hourly import of local stock from your own warehouse.

The file has to be generated automatically on your end, and you have to make sure that there are no duplicate records.

The file

should be tab separated, unless there are special reasons for something else
the name has to be the same every time, without date stamp, spaces or special characters in the name. Use English letters only.
don't use thousand separator

Required fields

manufacturer SKU	Must be unique
stock	integer
cost price	we need to know the decimal separator ("," or ".")

If you only include the required fields then stock and price will only be set for already existing products.

Optional fields

Product name	excluding the brand/manufacturer name
Manufacturer/brand name	List of existing brands
Admin category name or ID	IT products - admin category tree
Custom category name or ID	how to find category IDs
Image	file name for the product image (jpg, gif, png)
ETA	The expected arrival date of the next shipment. We need to know the date format.
Weight	Product weight. We need to know the decimal separator.
Short description	file name for the HTML product description file
Description	file name for the HTML product description file

If category ID (or name) is missing or invalid we will place the product in a special "LOCAL" category. You will have to place the product in the correct category using the manual admin tools.
If brand ID (or name) is missing or invalid we will set the manufacturer name to "OEM". You can set the correct brand name using the manual admin tools.
Short and regular descriptions may be included in the file itself if they don't contain line breaks. Should be enclosed in "".

Enduser/price matrix pricing

It is possible to include enduser price info either in the product file (say, setting the default price for the products), or you can create separate files for this purpose.
Keep in mind that price matrices are based on price markups. If we set a price for a product in the matrix, we are really setting a specific markup for that product at the time of the update. If the cost price changes, then the selling price will also change. If this is a problem (i.e. you have updates from other vendors that might affect the selling price), then we can set fixed selling prices using the campaign/bid function (also automatically).

Special handling

We need to now what to do if an existing local product is no longer present in your file:

remove the product from the catalog
set stock to zero, but otherwise leave it
do nothing

Custom category tree creation

We can create a custom category tree automatically on product import.
Each product needs to belong to a category, so you have to add at least one column with category name or ID in the product file. In addition we need a category tree file that contains the rest of the information (assuming you have several levels). You can add the whole category structure to the product file, if you want, in which case you fill in the complete tree information for each product.

topFolderName	closest to root
subFolderName
categoryName	contains products
categoryID	optional, but necessary if you used ID in the product file

a category does not need to belong to a folder - it can be directly in root.
a category can appear several places in the same category tree, but we don't recommend it. One category will be marked as the main category, and will be the only one affecting pricing, for instance (otherwise you could have different prices on the same product, depending on where you happened to find it in the tree).
you can have more than three levels, the above is just an example.

File delivery

we'll set up an FTP location for you on our end.