[dardub]

We currently have a static site with over 5000+ products using cart32. (cart32 is not managing the products however) The products occur in multiple pages on the website as well. I'm wondering if it would be possible to integrate lemonstand into the static site and use LS for the cart/checkout feature for the static products and then slowly move over the products into the database. So after a year of data entry, the site would then be using LS in the standard way. Or is this a stupid idea?

Maybe there are better options, but if we were to manually enter all the products at once it could possibly take several months. Meanwhile the products will be changing along with the prices. If we have a service data mine all the products, I think we'd end up spending a year fixing all the errors pulling data off our currently very unorganized site.

I think having a hybrid site would make this transition a little more smooth. I realize I'd have to do a lot of customization, just not sure if this is possible or not however.

[dardub]

I assume the crucial part of this task would be the ability to add items to the cart that don't exist in the catalog. I found this thread http://forum.lemonst...roduct-to-cart/
which I believe starts off discussing creating products on the fly. Would this be a good solution to my problem?

[Aleksey]

Hi, dardub!

Well, at the moment there is no way to move products to LemonStand database on checkout (and most likely there will be no such tool in the nearest future). But you can create a "generic" product with customizable fields like Name and price. When you place a product to the cart, you can assign the cart item some name and price (I'm not sure what will be a source of this data) and then use this information during the checkout.

The forum thread which you found is not very suitable for you needs, because there Hauke actually imports products from Fotolia. This thread could be more helpful: http://forum.lemonst...mization-issue/ Mitch builds a store where newspaper product cost depends on different factors which a visitor could configure on the product page before adding a product to the cart. Your situation is similar, but product properties should be provided as hidden fields (on loaded from another source).

Thank you

[Danny]

Just a quick suggestion: It might be worth looking into outsourcing the data entry as it may not be as cost prohibitive as you think. To make it easier, someone could enter products into a spreadsheet (so long as a product image path was saved) to speed things up. Then, you could covert it to a CSV and import it into LemonStand.

[dardub]

Thanks for the help, I really appreciate it. Before I came on board with this company they had a company in china enter in 2000 products for our magento site. Apparently we spent a year afterward fixing all the data that had been created. So that is my worry about outsourcing. Since I was not there when this happened, maybe it can be done more smoothly this time. We were still planning on doing it this way, but I then recently had the though that maybe we could migrate the data slowly and ensure that the catalog is done correctly the first time. I think part of the problem would be that our existing static site is not consistent with product information and does not have all the variables necessary for the new site.

I like that we can pass data to the product before adding to the cart. Very nice feature. I'll look into in more depth when I have a chance.

I'd welcome any extra input you have. You both are much much more knowledgeable than I.

[Aleksey]

Hi, dardub!

Even if you will be using the generic product approach, you will need to create some simple database of products which will contain product SKUs, prices and names. Using hidden fields on the product pages is not reliable - because a product price could be changed using FireBug before the product is added to the cart. So, it seems you will need to create the product database in any way, so maybe it is better to create usual LemonStand products, than use this workaround.

Thanks

[Aleksey]

Another idea - if your product pages have similar structure, then you can develop a simple crawler which will read all product pages and create LemonStand products using the information found on the pages.