Thank you & questions about populating VirtueMart

[Perd]

Thank you to all the people who developed Virtuemart. Although a bit intimidating and not always clear on what/how to do things, it is indeed a very powerful shopping cart.

We sell products from various manufacturers who supply us with price lists, other limited data in PDF and Excel. In addition to our brick and mortar shop, we are now busy with our online shop hoping to sell some of these products. We currently have one person creating products in VirtueMart by visiting supplier websites to capture images, product headings, descriptions and specifications. Then she creates these products in VirtueMart with a lot of copying and pasting. This is a tedious and time consuming task and progress is slow on our side. We have been at it now for a month and have around 700 complete products listed. We already have CSV Improved Pro installed which will help with prices changes. But with many thousands of products more to do .... we are far behind on pace. With some suppliers rapidly changing products, we will never catch up.

1. Are there better solutions out there to populate VirtueMart with products?
2. Should we employ more people to do this - if so;
a. Who (what is this profession called)?
b. How do we manage and co-ordinate things?

Your know-how, experience and suggestions are welcome!

[GJC Web Design]

1. There are ( usually fairly one off) systems to automatically create/update VM products using xml, csv feeds etc..
The problem is if you have a variety of suppliers this is really not feasible because first u need them to supply you with nicely formatted data or u have to format the data yourself to be able to import.

If you can collect this data in a single format (xls etc) then u can use a script or software ( csvi or studio 42s importer) .. but it is still a huge amount of "office work" to get your data clean and ready.

2. my approach is any one between the age of ~ 16->18
they are totally computer savy, cheap and if u find a reliable one they can rip thru the work for starvation wages...
I use my daughter for tasks like this....

3. ask the suppliers if they have any sort of data feed etc but in most cases it isn't very likely unless they are supplying lots of retailers ....

[Studio 42]

I already done a own javascript to get all informations from supplier websites that captured all informations in one time.
If the structure is not to complicate, it's possible to load by ajax inside the same windows each product from same category and extract all including image links too.
In last Vm Be pro, you have now import images from URL requested by same customer and included for all since 3 months.
I needed 5 or 6 hours to get near 300 products with this method, but the longest was to do the javascript; so if i had to include 1000 product perhaps total time is only 1 or 2 hours more.

Another solution is to use CURL and DOMDocument(); in PHP if you prefer, but you need that the manufacturers website is public

[Perd]

Thank you for the feedback - it is informative. The VM BE PRO also looks promising - although it looks complicated.