Announcement

Collapse
No announcement yet.

Should I Stay or Should I Go?

Collapse
X
 
  • Filter
  • Time
  • Show
Clear All
new posts

    Should I Stay or Should I Go?

    We are currently looking to update our site with new product data but it’s a proving a bit tricky!

    We sell kitchens online and have a range of kitchens available to purchase in a number of styles and finishes. Where we offer a cabinet product, for example a base unit we offer the appropriate door in the size and quantity required and have done this through associating the cabinet product with the appropriate fascia located in another section of the store.

    The downside of offering the product in this manner is we have to add an instance of the cabinet data for every range of doors we sell in order to make an association with a specific door product. We have over 1000 individual cabinets and over 60 door ranges so this makes for a lot of data inside actinic and as you would expect performance of the application has suffered as a result.

    This entire section of our website over 50k product lines was created through hierarchical file import right down to picture paths by parsing 2 different suppliers data to provide an import file which was 28mb alone! Understanding how this file has been generated is beyond our capability and it seems many of the developers we have spoken to.

    Our website is in desperate need of an update in order to maintain a competitive edge and to make things a little more difficult the company that created the import file for us is no longer in business. I do want to stay with the Actinic especially as v9.03 is on the horizon which hopefully will cure some of our other woes but it seems we are being faced with a commercial decision to make on the platform on which we base our future ecommerce activity.

    I’m hoping this post will prompt a little advice from some of the more experienced members of the actinic community there may be a more efficient way of offering the product which will do away with the hierarchical file method but offer the same functionality.

    Apologies for the length of this post and any advice greatly appreciated.

    #2
    John you are using the wrong product without question IMO. You simply must go online database with the amount of product lines you have and the need for repetitive choices (actinic is happy with 10k max products IMO).

    I had a similar situation with an electronics company recently, where we wanted to install a product builder where you can build your own sound system, choosing speakers etc. We couldn't do exactly what we wanted with Actinic (showing images and info on each choice) as the resultant numbers of combinations we'd need to do was pretty large, however that was with a much smaller product base. We came up with a happy medium in the end, but it was on a smaller scale than your problem.

    Comment


      #3
      I know someone is working on a pure customised site with many thousands of products, and this would probably be they way your going to end up.

      There are alot of free e-commerce packages, take a look and have a play they might not suit you.

      Comment


        #4
        pure customised site with many thousands of products
        Who's that then?

        Comment


          #5
          I could not possibly say Gabe - If i did i would..................

          Comment


            #6
            Guys - I am going to edit this thread to remove mentions of competitors - which is against forum guidelines (competitors can promote themselves on their own servers)

            Comment


              #7
              Thanks guys I've almost come to the same conclusion. My thoughts were to find someone who can do the 'Black Magic' required to generate the hierarchical files on an ongoing basis. I'd then cope with the inevitable performance hit by upgrading the Multi-Users hardware to something ridiculously fast in the hope it'll compensate for the applications sluggish performance. Does this sound like a plan or just plain old desperation!

              I'm paranoid about losing listings on Google so moving to a data driven site even with 'safe' url strings sends shiver down my spine given the very sensitive nature of Google. For reference our site is at www.withknobson.com in order you may get an idea of the scale of our site.

              Comment


                #8
                Hows about a site per style then or something along those lines? 9.0.3 should speed your site up when it is launched (circa 2012), until then like you say it will run like a dog. Could you have a central hub of some kind where people choose the style they wish to look at and then get directed to that particular site. You could stay with actinic then, you'd just need multisite.

                PS - you might want to check your site out in IE7, the layout looks broken.

                Comment


                  #9
                  thanks Lee I'm assuming your referring to the dodgy skyscraper ad I hastily wedged in as a background. The multi-site idea deserves some thought and could provide a viable workaround.

                  On the subject of v9.0.3 I called support to ascertain a probable, to the nearest 6 months release date but got nee luck there. I think we'll hang on a little longer to see what this version fixes then we'll have to make our mind up on which way we turn.

                  Comment


                    #10
                    Originally posted by orcharduk View Post
                    Thanks guys I've almost come to the same conclusion. My thoughts were to find someone who can do the 'Black Magic' required to generate the hierarchical files on an ongoing basis. I'd then cope with the inevitable performance hit by upgrading the Multi-Users hardware to something ridiculously fast in the hope it'll compensate for the applications sluggish performance. Does this sound like a plan or just plain old desperation!
                    To generate the hierarchical file from other sources is not black magic but may well seem to be. It needs a thorough understanding of not just actinic, and databases but also how your site pages are setup, not for the faint hearted but still just data crunching at the end. The amount of work needed will depend on your source data.

                    Malcolm

                    SellerDeck Accredited Partner,
                    SellerDeck 2016 Extensions, and
                    Custom Packages

                    Comment


                      #11
                      that's the easy bit 2 formatted .csv files one containing the door range the other containing the cabinet range. Rub the two together sprinkle lightly with powdered frog and hey presto - Structured hierarchical file format ready for import. But something at the back of my mind tells me that there currently is still a problem with hierarchical file imports under v9.02 or has it been fixed?

                      Comment


                        #12
                        Originally posted by orcharduk View Post
                        But something at the back of my mind tells me that there currently is still a problem with hierarchical file imports under v9.02 or has it been fixed?
                        I can't speak for exporting from V9.0.2 but when I tried to export a working site from V8.5.3 and import to V9.0.2 it didn't work, so I tried importing into a clean V8.5.3 site and that failed too. Not just missing images, but also invalid sections, import failed to get any sections from the catalog.

                        So does hierarchical file import work at all on the latest versions!!

                        Malcolm

                        SellerDeck Accredited Partner,
                        SellerDeck 2016 Extensions, and
                        Custom Packages

                        Comment


                          #13
                          Well I think we know the answer to that one Malcolm it doesn't for me personally but I have coaxed and cajoled well over 50,000 products into Actinic so no wonder its being a bit unpredictable. Maybe v9.03 will put an end to the countless reboots and lost hours spent on v9.02 maybe then my hair will grow back and I'll get to bed before 3.00 in the morning!

                          Comment


                            #14
                            I thought this was a thread about The Clash.


                            Yours,


                            Dissapointed of Planet Strummer.
                            Football Heaven

                            For all kinds of football souvenirs and memorabilia.

                            Comment


                              #15
                              it is George only in a slightly different context!

                              Comment

                              Working...
                              X