Duplicate Products and External Data

[Mark H]

I want to have identical duplicate products on my site, all fully updated by the linked external Excel spreadsheet that we use to run the shop - I had a look at the threads posted last year on this topic which suggested that Actinic might deal with this or that external programmers might produce a fix - what is the current position? Thanks in advance for your help. Mark H.

PS the reason I want lots of identical products is so that one link can show all blue widgets made by different manufacturers, and another link can show all widgets (of any colour) made by one manufacturer - so there would have to be duplicates in two different sections - perhaps there is another, better, way of doing this that doesn't involve duplicate products (and that doesn't involve the search function)??

[Bruce]

Hi,

You can use an external linked spreadsheet to update your products and their duplicates. If you create a duplicate product and then using the export facility (File | export) make an export of the catalog, you will see that the original product has a reference number of 1 for example and the first instance of a duplicate will have a refrence number of 1!1 the second instance will have 2!1 and so on. You can use the exported file as an example to structure your external spreadsheet to update the site.

Using the duplicate product approach would be the best bet, else you will have to create a section for each manufacturer and have the individual products listed under each section. You will also have to use the search function to create the links to display as you would like them to.

Kind regards,