Connecting to 3rd parties for stock levels ?

Hi,

We have a lot of items on our site, is it possible to connect to another company who provides us with stock and find the stock levels ?

at the moment we have to go through updating stock levels on each item on our system while checking it off on 3rd party site.  We have to log on to their site and do a search then read off & enter the stock levels on nop (3.4).  Its slow and has to be done every now and again.  We get orders we can't fulfill because we don't have the stock = bad rep.

Since we can check stock on the suppliers website -  it must be possible to get it to fetch it automatically, there are some problems with clothe sizes (european and UK) but is it possible  ?

Please advise !!

zxbsgr8 wrote:

Hi,

Does the provider offer the XML service? If yes than you can write custom task for update stock, price, etc.

I don't know.  We never contacted them about it but we can log into their website - search for a product and view how many are in stock.

They could be using any kind of system.

So you think a webservice would do the trick ?

zxbsgr8 wrote:

Yes webservice is solution.

We have done stock "mirroring" in the following way:
- Every night we copy the existing stock of the wharehouse into the store inventory. This is done as a batch process.
- Then during the day everytime there is a change in stock in an item of the warehouse, the new stock level for the item is copied into the store. This is by means of Web Services
I hope it helps.

You really need to talk to your supplier about having a webservice or XML file you can connect to.  Don't try to screen scrape with something like this, it's too volatile.

AndyMcKenna wrote:

I don't think a webservice will be given.

We got an excel/csv file on their stock level.  I can export our stock to excel from nop.  So  a macro to search for SKU and replace stock quantity field would do and then import again(should be ok?).  The only thing is that our sku's can't be found on the file they sent.

eadameg wrote:

Hi, I am also trying to do a similar thing, but run into performance issues. (is it the reason you're doing a full update only once a day?,  do the individual updates sometime fail so you need the full update regularly?   i though to run it only occasionally as a check-up or first-time-mirroring only)
Could you please check my question in my recent topic '_productService.UpdateProduct vs manipulating the database directly' ?
Thanks.

I just worked out the VLOOKUP I need to use to check one excel spreadsheet against the other.

Can I uploaded the excel spreadsheet back to nop once I got the right stock level ?

libor wrote:
Yes, we do full update overnight for performance reason and also to correct in case a partial (individual) update went wrong during the day.
Manipulating the DB directly is much faster but as you point out some functionality of NopCommerce (like notifying the stock owner about low stock, or back-in-stock notification sent to customers) is  lost also in this approach.