I have read various posts about matching products to categories and using the import/export tool, but we have quite a specialised requirement and I really don't know the best way to go about it.


To give an example, we built a web site selling printer cartridges with about 800 products. To be able to find the correct cartridge for the correct printer we set up the categories as brand/type of printer/printer model.



This makes it very easy for the customer to navigate to the cartridge they require. However maintaining the store is a nightmare because there are currently about 1400 printer model categories! So, when adding products we have to associate them with any number of the 1400 categories. We need to do a major upgrade of products and categories, so I need to decide the easiest way to do it.



I realise that we can manually associate products with categories and manually associate categories with products. I also understand that we can use the import/export tool. However with the format of the category id's in the database, this is not any easy job.



I wondered if anyone else has had a simlar problem and whether anyone has any suggestions to make this product upgrade as simple and accurate as possible.



Many thanks,



Jenny

Jenny,

It sounds like you need drill-down navigation (or layered navigation or guided search or any of the other names for it). That would allow you to assign meta-data to products and automatically create categories containing all the correct variations of products.

Shoot me an email and I can tell you a little bit about what we've been working on.