M2E Pro how does it handle stock feeds

[DSLiverpool]

After a year if trying we have ditched Brightpearl, it never fully worked and the support just wasn't good enough - £8k wasted.

M2E seems like it does the basics but I cannot see how it takes a stick feed from our suppliers in CSV format and loads it into eBay, amazon etc - can anyone enlighten me please.

[jammy_basturd]

It's been about a year since I did anything Magento, but that last project was a year long goliath involving M2E.

We didn't actually use M2E to import, we used Magmi. Much, much quicker than any Magento plugin importer. We ran into problems getting a good enough spec server to keep up with the import and rebuilding the caches.

In fact, I'm pretty sure at the time M2E didn't do import, so you're left with the stock Magento or a third party importer like Magmi - I'd fully recommend Magmi, though it is open source so don't expect it to be completely smooth and trouble free.

What was the issue with Brightpearl? After no joy with the two leading options (Brightpearl and Linnworks) have you considered going custom?

[DSLiverpool]

We heavily customise a lot of skus and BP couldn't handle it, they said it would, rewrote bits but it never did - I know M2E can update amazon and eBay as we need it but I am stumped how we get the feeds into the magento back end reliably.

Really a year to sort - we have 5000 skus but say one item has 20 variations

[jammy_basturd]

That's exactly what I was doing, but using Magmi. Importing 70k SKUs at a time, which made up ~7-8k product lines.

Really doesn't take long to set up magmi, I'd get your Magento devs to set up a proof of concept and see what you think.

[DSLiverpool]

Ok ta - falling out of love rapidly with Webtise however

[951TSE]

These guys may be able to help:

https://understandinge.com/magento-tutorials/

There's loads of video tutorials most free, with some premium content.

[jardinec]

For getting things into Magento I would also recommend Magmi. Get your website folks to investigate.

Im right in the middle of a project just now and its being use to import the initial product catalogue, and then ongoing updates. Its very fast. a bit odd to setup but once an import profile is setup (via the web interface) it can then be called via the command line (or in my case from PHP code)

Assuming M2E handles the Magento->Ebay / Magento->Amazon options so all you need to do is keep the stock csv in synch.

Get your web devs to write a custom script to fetch the stock csv, import it into the correct Magento fields using Magmi, and refresh the indexes. The import might only need to use SKU and Qty so it should be quite lightweight.

[DSLiverpool]

Ta

[rich1231]

HAve a look about something like Akeneo to manage product data, it is a Product Information Management system and integrates with Magento.

What are you going to use to manage orders once taken? To me Magento even a modded up backend is possible the worst system in the universe to run picking and packing of orders in.

[russy01]

Morning Dave,

Have you ever had a chat with Channel Advisor?

Russ

[DSLiverpool]

russy01 said:

Morning Dave,

Have you ever had a chat with Channel Advisor?

Russ

7% of T/O I think ! anyway may be too late for me now, I may take the shilling .......

[russy01]

7% sounds ridiculous. If you want a chat, let me know and I'll put you in touch with my account manager.