Are you planning to use WordPress to set up an online store? Because you can use WooCommerce to set it up, and then use its importer to upload the products. If you have an inventory team, I strongly suggest you to tell them to read the WooCommerce documentation
Along the lines of what a2hostingrj said.
There are many WordPress sites doing ecommerce.
WooCommerce is by far best known, however I would encourage you to investigate and test on a small scale other solutions. There are also other open source ecommerce platforms.
Your 40,000 products is not a problem, issues such as transactions per hour should be investigated.
Thanks @a2hostingrj. I do plan on using WordPress to set up an online store. I would like to use WooCommerce to do it if I could. I had convinced myself that WooCommerce could handle all the complex associations between say an engine, its assemblies, parts per assembly, associated diagrams, and current inventory. I will have to relook at Woocommerce to see if it handles this kind of complexity.
Thanks @rossmitchell. I don’t even completely understand what the various e-commerce plugins can do. I will go recheck WooCommerce since it is best known. And thanks for the transactions tip.
The problem with WooCommerce and probably any other ecommerce solution in WordPress is that the products are saved as WP post objects. This can be an ongoing maintenance issue when the actual product data is maintained elsewhere. Sure, the data can somehow be regularly updated from the original source, but IMO it’d be better to get the data directly from the source for any given query.
The drawback is it may not be possible to directly query the source database from your WP server. Even if you could, the code needed to do so may need to be custom developed because the DB schema probably does not match that of any existing plugin. Maybe there’s a plugin that allows for any arbitrary schema?
@bcworkz, thank you. I am really struggling to understand if I am going to have to go the custom route or not. I’m a novice developer fresh out of bootcamp. Correct me if need be, I think you are saying that I need to create a boat parts database on a separate server and a user would query that database. Of course, a plugin that has that ability to take arbitrary schema would be awesome. I am not sure what it will take to set up a server in man-hours either.
You can place the data in the same DB that WP uses, either as custom table(s) or configured as product posts for an ecommerce plugin. If the data is already in a mySQL database, migrating to a WP DB would be straight forward. This is assuming the server hardware is up to the task. The number of records isn’t an issue, it’s whether queries can be completed in a timely manner. If it’s not up to the task, usually more resource can be applied to bring it up to the task.
I despise redundant data, I’d prefer to query from the original source if at all possible. But if it’s not a SQL DB, let’s hope PHP can at least still access it. If some sort of API is available for making queries, all the better. If querying the original source isn’t feasible, there’d need to be some sort of update mechanism so the data can remain somewhat in sync with the original source.
Querying from the original source will almost certainly require custom coding, but same goes for a regular update mechanism. If you’re forced to replicate the data, then the choice is custom table or plugin post data. A custom table is easier to import and update, but you’d then have to develop custom queries for it. Post data is more difficult to import, but making queries is largely built-in as part of the ecommerce plugin.
I follow up until the last paragraph. So, if I understand you correctly if I cannot query the original database, I can build a custom table in WP. Or I can use a plugin that handles post data?
Sorry for the slow reply. That’s right. If the data can be imported as post data, any e-commerce plugin that uses a matching data schema could be used. The import solution would need to know how to match that schema. It’s much easier to import into a custom table, but then no plugin would know how to access the data. You’d need to build your own queries.
The latest is there is a couple of new pieces that make the job more defined.
1. There is a parts catalog that will be displayed using an iframe. That solves user’s searches within the iframe so that they can drill down for parts.
2. I am looking into WPAllImport plugin as a way to take our inventory data feed and auto import all the csv data into Woocommerce post data using a schedule. I think that is how this will work.
If this turns out to be a pretty seamless import function, that could help a lot of people with similar needs.
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This reply was modified 5 years, 1 month ago by
sethshow.
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This reply was modified 5 years, 1 month ago by sethshow.
