Caster Technology Corporation: populating 2 million product SKUs hands-free

Challenge

In addition to its brick and mortar stores chain, Caster Technology decided to create an online presence. The challenge was to push their 2 million SKUs stored in an ERP system to the new store. Populating the descriptions for all the products were no easy task. Irvine had to implement a way to create descriptions and attributes easily. Additionally, this was a multi-store solution, so the same product needed to have a way of being descripted differently in each store.

Solution

Irvine used nopCommerce 3.7. They discovered that each letter in product SKU is an identifying factor. Therefore a 16-character length product SKU has enough identifying factors to populate the description from. Irvine provided the following:

• Created a middle-tier application that communicated with nopCommerce and the ERP system
  
  1. The application uses SKU numbers to generate descriptions
  2. Created an image processing system that resizes all images in bulk and attaches watermark
  3. Created a push process that pushes all descriptions to nopCommerce
  4. Created a push process that pushes all images to Azure CDN
• Created a process for the platform to process the product information received and populate the product database
• Created a pull service that retrieves all images from Azure CDN
• Customized administration panel to allow multiple names and description for the same product within each store
• Created an auto-store detect which changes store theme colors and logo based on a store code

Result

2 million SKUs were pushed to nopCommerce store hands-free with no manual work. 12 stores are created on a single platform, the plan is to go up to 50.

At the moment, the online store is rather a catalog, so a customer should call the company to get a quote. The plan now is to integrate the pricing structure and Avalara for taxing.

Irvine Software Company is a premier technology consulting firm specializing in web and application development, providing solutions to small businesses across the globe.