I want to maintain a database of all the products or the brands with respect to industry.
For example I need to get information about all the food supplements. How can I get them?
I am not sure all the companies have an API for their products.
Please advise
Uhm,... what kind of information? If you need prices, you can probably get information from goverment sources. At least you can here in Argentina. Other than that, I don't think it's possible, unless you somehow manage to scrape websites of all the brands you want to track.
Speaking as someone who has worked for two data-aggregation companies, aggregating data involves a lot of manual work. You find the sources, you automate the acquisition of data as best you can (APIs, file downloads and imports, even screen scraping from HTML pages), and you stay on top of it constantly. You're always looking for additional sources, updating code for sources that have changed, minding legal implications of sources who don't want you to harvest their data, etc.
Sometimes you have to buy the data, or weigh that cost against not having data from that source or scraping it manually. Sometimes a source will block you in some way and you need to either try to get around that or negotiate some terms with them. It's a viable business model, but it's not cheap.
For some products, Retailigence ( http://www.retailigence.com ) may have data in API form. They basically keep track of local stores' inventory and pricing for certain categories of products.
You should definitely check out Good Guide - an API that gives you access to details on over 60,000 household products.
http://developer.goodguide.com
DailyMed is a good service to check out if you're interested in products in the medical space.
http://dailymed.nlm.nih.gov/dailymed
Related
I'm a technical person with in-depth knowledge on Python and its framework. I've build an ecommerce store using Django-Oscar. I've multiple products in my store.
My store offers a large assortment of products in the Electronics category. A new and upcoming sub-category is surveillance and security systems. However, due to the varied nature of products in this category, the products are distributed across “Home Security” (Under Appliances) and “Security Systems”, etc. (under the Computers & Laptop > Office Equipment). A better understanding of the market segments is required for better positioning these products.
I reviewed Maplin, another e-store that provides same category of products on its store for better placing of my products.
Since I'm not a business analyst or a sales person, I want to get some recommendations/suggestions on how my e-commerce store can structure the products to increase conversion based on your review of the Maplin Storefront and my own product mix in this category. The constraint is that I cannot create a separate level 1 category for surveillance and security systems.
i tried Google on where should a particular product be placed to increase the conversion rate, but to little fortune. Also, I tried finding other SO portals where this type of question is a fit, but couldn't find any. So, if you can let me know the appropriate portal for this kind of question, it will be of great help!!! You can provide your recommendation/suggestions here as well.
Thanks!!! Appreciate your help!!!
register for google webmaster tools
https://www.google.com/webmasters/tools/
-- then verify your website with google
take a look at google merchant center
https://www.google.com/merchants/
this page has links to google product taxonomy docs with categories etc
https://support.google.com/merchants/answer/160081
amazon is also worth looking at http://www.amazon.com/gp/help/customer/display.html?nodeId=200218500
next step would be structured data for the products
https://support.google.com/webmasters/answer/1211158
http://schema.org/Product
I have to integrate my webshop with an external system. This system provides several functionalities, described in their API. This is what I want to do:
Import/sync products (this is available as CSV via request)
Update stock of products (also available as webrequest)
So I have to hook into the Magento stock check and I want some script which updates the products like everyday.
Where should I implement my changes? What is the best way to do this? I can imagine Magento already have some API stock functionalities, but can`t seem to find the right documentation.
Thanks in advance!
Firstly you could use the Magento web service via either SOAP and XML-RPC:
http://www.magentocommerce.com/api/soap/introduction.html#Introduction-SOAP
There's an API for updating stock levels:
http://www.magentocommerce.com/api/soap/catalogInventory/cataloginventory_stock_item.update.html
However, this is usually quite slow and can take some time to update large collections of products, in which case you are better going for a solution which uses the Magento object model directly, or something custom.
Depending upon your level of development expertise there's a few options available. One library to checkout is Magmi:
http://sourceforge.net/apps/mediawiki/magmi/index.php?title=Magmi_Wiki
this is useful for updating lots of product data / stock levels quite quickly.
If you do no require an automated solution, you could always use the standard Magento import/export profiles to import stock levels from a CSV file, a quick search for 'Magento Import Export Profiles' should give you a good starting place:
http://www.seenbest-web-design.com/techclub/importing-a-csv-of-products-to-magento/
http://www.woolleydesign.net/2011/02/updating-store-inventory-in-magento/
I am fully functionally using Magmi now. I have written a plugin to automatically create configurable products, so if anyone is ever interested let me know.
There is already a plugin to process configurable products, my plugin is dependent on that plugin.
Basically, you will only be able to create configurable products if you especially have added this to your CSV, with a column named 'type'. In the column type you can set simple or configurable. With my module that won`t be nessecary. By some logic I automatically recognize the simple products and create a new configurable containing those products.
A little explanation on why I need this:
The stock system of our client updates a list of product (CSV) every few hours, containing entries of products. They sell clothing, and every size, and every color is a new entry. So one product can have 10 entries, entry 1: t-shirt green, size 12; entry 2: t-shirt green, size 13, etc.
I explain this, just in case anybody would ever need something like this, my plugin will probably help you. It will although need a few modification for your situation, since this is very specific to how your list of products is composed.
Anyway, thanks for your help!
A client of mine has a service-oriented ecommerce site on Shopify and he's asked me to assist in making a few changes. I've never utilized the service so I'm not really familiar with it.
The price list was static at first since the client used the same vendor however now that they're growing - and therefore using multiple vendors - the costs are fluctuating and therefore the prices on Shopify need to reflect that.
I need to set it up so that when a customer logs on a vendor is programmatically chosen based on their geographic location and the prices (shown to the customer) adjust accordingly.
Is this possible? And if so, what objects/API docs should I be looking at. I seems as if I can easily hard code this with IF statements but I'd like this to scale cleanly so I'm looking for a more efficient solution.
I think this should be possible. Based on your comment:
Will I not have a zip code for the customer? – RyanMac
The easiest way would be to create a Product Variant for each region. Based on the customer.default_address you could find the customers ZIP code. Next step would be to use this within the product.liquid template to select the correct variant.
The biggest problem you have is determining their location. When a customer logs in, you know who they are, so you could dish out only products of interest to them. Problem is, how do you lump people into those regions? You have your work cut out there. When you create a customer you can assign them any code you want, so perhaps you could just match customers to vendors using a match on that. Lump any customers into GroupA and you show only products with Vendor GroupA, any customers assigned to GroupB render products from vendor GroupB....etc
I'm working on a store that has two types of products: perishable food and general merchandise. The food must always be shipped overnight via FedEx, and the other merchandise must always be shipped via USPS. If somebody orders products from both categories, they must be shipped separately.
Do you know of an existing module or configuration settings that would allow for this?
If not, it sounds like a custom module would be the other solution. In this case, what is the best approach? I'm thinking it would be splitting the order into a multi-address shipment, using the same address for both but with different shipping methods. Unfortunately I'm not sure how to do this programatically, so any tutorials/samples/resources would be greatly appreciated.
Probably the sanest way to handle this would be to create two orders per product type, each shipping with a different carrier to the same address. This also IMO makes more sense from a stores tracking perspective as you can handle each independently from each other.
To get you on the right track(since Magento is especially cryptic in this part of itself) you should read the Inchoo programmatically create order in Magento post and by the same author Programatically create customer and order in Magento with full blown one page checkout.
Basically as I see this going is:
Get the customer order
Itinerate through each product inside the order and split it up in two arrays for each product type
Create a separate order for each product type and use the different shipping methods for each.
You will probably have to extend a some controllers OR do it the non-standard way and use helper functions for this, the hard parts will be integrating the payment/shipping modules inside your order process. Going this way will have you creating the full checkout process as the one page checkout Magento provides won't really work and is too much pain to get to work because of the way it uses AJAX.
Also another alternative is to hook in to Magento's pre-create order events and create the orders there using already defined order data split it up in two orders, but this is something I never heard or saw implemented at the moment so you'd have to do it "blindfolded" so to speak.
An easier approach would be to use a custom field that defines your product's shipping method, this way you just add that and don't care about custom orders. You just react with that, however tracking will become mostly impossible IMO.
Over-ride the Free Shipping module.
You can setup a sales rule that applies to certain products and makes them 'Free Shipping', leaving the other products to your chosen main shipment provider.
You will need to see how this works, however, the point is that Magento does have something built in to split an order into two shipping categories, albeit only a sales rule on free shipping. But you have source code...
I apologize for being rather vague here, but I'm working on a project involving stock data and stock purchases. I'm sure I'm going to end up having to get a broker involved, but I was wondering if anyone knows of any documentation on the underlying technology involved with existing trading sites, as well as the channels through which systems like google finance get their information.
Note that I already know of the APIs from yahoo and tdameritrade that send out the data, I'm interested in the channels through which that data travels to them in the first place.
They're most likely getting the data feeds from one or more of the usual suspects (ie, Reuters, Bloomberg and the like). You've probably noticed that the feeds on the publically accessible websites are delayed by 15-20 minutes compared to the real time feeds. Keep that in mind in your application, if you need proper up to date/real time market data it'll cost you a fair penny.
Those firms trading directly on the exchanges obviously have access to the data from the actual exchange - that's what you (have to) use in real time and algorithmic trading. However, the above mentioned companies (and I'm sure there are a few more, these are just the ones that most people are familiar with) are usually the data providers for those trading via intermediaries.
For reference data on stocks (as opposed to actual stock quote data), Mergent ( http://www.mergent.com ) is one of the data suppliers and has been collecting the data for decades. It has a set of APIs at http://www.mergent.com/servius