uposCommerce solutions for online resellers
Recently we have received a number of requests from our customers who asked to integrate advanced stock and product management facilities into their existing osCommerce online stores. Interestingly enough quite some of those requests were about implementing facilities to download product information from 3d party web sites, and product price and stock information for some other 3d party web sites.
So how does this system work?
First of all they do not hold ANY product information in their databases except for product model ID.
Secondly, store owners prefer not to hold ANY stock. All stock is being held by their suppliers.
Product information (such as description, images, technical specification) is downloaded from a 3d party web site that holds all this data, and updates it all the time. Dependently on the implementation osCommerce downloads product data say, once a day (a bigger file is downloaded and parsed and product information is imported into the database) or every time the user gets to the Product Information page (then a query is sent to the 3d party web site to retrieve product specific data).
The benefits of the first approach are product data is downloaded once a day putting less workload on the server, and is downloaded in full, i.e. this approach allows for some more advanced search facilities using all available fields.
Now, what about stock and price? Stock figures come from suppliers, same as purchase prices for our customers - osCommerce store owners. A reasonable approach would be to set certain margin per each category of products in the Admin panel and calculate the sale price accordingly, based on the purchase price and the margin. This way all sale prices will be calculated automatically, and will depend on the purchase prices set by the suppliers. This way all special offers provided by suppliers will automatically affect the sale price in osCommerce.
The only one more issue to consider is what to do in case when there are multiple suppliers for one and the same product. In this case osCommerce will have to select a supplier with items in stock and the best price to the moment. As soon as the suppliers run out of stock - osCommerce will have to select a new supplier with stock and the best price to the moment.
During the last several months we’ve worked with http://www.hosteddatasheets.com and http://www.icecat.biz to retrieve detailed product information for osCommerce sites of our customers.
We dealt with Ingram Micro, Computer 2000, Midwich, and other suppliers of various products.
The system works great in general, and can be relatively easily extended to include other suppliers and other providers of product details. With the front and back end of the system fully compatible with osCommerce, it happens to be a perfect solution for online resellers.