Major appliance retail chain integrates entire catalogs of major appliances with tools from Haverstick
The Client
A local chain of major appliance stores
The Challenge
A small retail chain had a Web site and browser-based administrative tool for adding products to its catalog manually. The process was slow and time-consuming, and depended on a Web master to view printed vendor catalogs and retype a subset of the data into its tool. The client wanted to be able to receive updates from suppliers that they could directly import, price and publish to their site.
The Haverstick Approach
First we worked with the client’s vendors to understand their proprietary formats and schemas: XML files, Microsoft Access databases, Excel spreadsheets, and HTML files. We then analyzed all of the content available within each format, including what data was available, what the fields were called (in relation to the client’s) and how those fields were grouped.
Haverstick implemented Commerce Server for the catalog system itself. To handle the disparate data transmissions from the client’s suppliers, Haverstick created custom translation routines to import each vendor’s data into the Commerce Server catalog system, using XML, XSLT and Microsoft’s ADO.
The Result
The client now has thousands more items in its catalog than before, with less effort and more data per item.
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