The Story
Do you have an experience to share on creating and managing
your Miva Merchant store content? If so, please send it to us, and we'll share
it with the Miva Merchant community.
Here's our story:
There
is an old saying, "Necessity is the mother of invention," and
in the case of StoreMan, this is certainly true.
In
late 1999, Phosphor Media began work on a quilting and sewing
supply site. Miva Merchant appeared to be a solid fit for the
company in terms of ease of customization, straightforward management
of data, and certainly the competitive price point.
Our content system was originally based on Microsoft Excel spreadsheets
supplied by the distributor. This proved problematic, with many
issues relating to importing and exporting text from Excel (for
instance, inch and foot symbols used in the quilting and sewing
world).
We decided to switch to Microsoft Access. This was more robust,
but still required output to text files and file upload to the
server.
As we added more products, we found that the flat-file upload/import
process would often time out, meaning we had to start it over
again. (This was not a welcome event at 1:00 a.m.) In addition,
there was always the chance of rogue data getting placed into
the system somehow after a failed import. One possible solution
would have been to lease a dedicated server, but the additional
cost at this time wasn't justifiable, nor would it solve the problem
completely.
We
worked around the upload problem by transferring the files directly
with FTP, and then doing a flat-file import once they were on
the server. This eliminated the time outs, but still required
the use of multiple applications (Access, text editor, FTP client,
Merchant Admin).
About
this time, the client decided to use attributes and options for
some of the products. Unfortunately, our content management system
could not handle attributes. We found a freeware option loader
script that would work and adjusted it to incorporate this new
functionality.
By
now, our system was somewhat unwieldy. Changes were difficult
to make, and adding one product or fifty were equally hard, because
ALL the data had to be exported to text, uploaded, and imported
through the Merchant Admin. Because the data had to move between
so many applications, it was too easy to make mistakes.
The
straw that broke the metaphorical camel's back was when the client
asked us to set up the content management system on their computers,
so they could take over the day to day work of adding, editing,
and deleting products, categories, and attributes. If our system
was a bear for US to use, no way would relatively untrained retail
staff be able to use it.
We
decided to look into a better way. After determining there were
no existing solutions that met our criteria of local management,
Windows-based, database-aware tools, we set about creating our
own. After a short while, it was obvious that this tool could
be of great use to many others as well. And so StoreMan was born.
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