How To Automate Feed Into ShopSite?

[joelholtzman]

Hello,

I used the search on this forum and I couldn't find the answer. I hope it is ok to ask this question, assuming it isn't asked 100 times per week. I am very new to Shopsite and we have a client who currently uses it and one question that came up was how would one, if possible, automate a feed import into shopsite? Is there a php based api I can use with cron or some other method I should know about? We would be on a linux server.

The reason I ask is because we are going to clone an existing site for a client, they use shopsite, but there will be some differences I believe in the prices/currency and product selection and importing products they add in their system (they use wordpress) and import that data from their db, to shopsite, instead of manual import into shopsite, would be a huge time saver.

So which resource should I investigate to help us accomplish this task? or is it something that has to be paid for for custom development?

Thank you.

[Jim]

A list of all the API that can be used to interface programmatically with ShopSite can be found on http://shopsite.com/help/11.2/en-US/install/addon_programs.html
For uploading products you would use the Products and Pages Upload/Download API help can be found on this page http://shopsite.com/help/11.2/en-US/sc/pro/database.automated_XML_upload.html This API uses an xml format for uploading data into ShopSite so you would need to create an application to export the data from your other database to the proper xml format that ShopSite uses. Then you would create a program to access the API interface to do the actual upload.

If your other database can export data to a tab delimited format then you can upload that into ShopSite using the database upload functionality of the backoffice (Utilities > Data Base > Upload > Pages or Products. )

There isn't an API for ShopSite that will work with the tab delimited format, however for my testing I use the "iMacros for Firefox" addon (it is also available for other browsers see http://www.iopus.com/index.htm ). You can create scripts that can do just about anything that can be done with a browser. So you can record a iMacro that uploads a specific file to the ShopSite interface and then make it a bookmark in you browser that just has to be clicked. I use this functionality daily to upgrade my test stores to the latest version and run task such as uploading products and pages, placing orders, etc. It may be easier to implement something this way than to create scripts to extract the data from your other database in an xml format and a script to interface with the ShopSite API to do the uploading.