We are a company that offers promotional items, and we work with sanmar for t-shirts and other apparel. Anyone know how to import their database into Magento? It looks real intensive, and Magento isn't something I have a lot of experience with.
At a glance this is doable but I don't think they are fully equipped to do this with magento per say. Essentially what you would have to do is enter one product into magento with all variations including size, color etc. and then export that csv file. Then you compare the two basically and create an import file that magento can deal with. That said, it seems you would have a few hurdles. At a glance you would have to still order things from the distributor so you are essentially adding another step. So checkout stuff is a bit of a quandry. Getting the products in the system should be fairly trivial though. It is certainly possible though http://www.clkapparel.com/index.php/distributor/sanmar.html Someone did it there as far as I can tell. They are actually running more of a mall setup with multiple distributors. That said, http://www.sanmar.com/marketing/custom_websites.jsp?ql=Y it looks like they will do it with their own system but they don't look so hot. I would have to speak to them about integrating the payment process so it simply uses theirs but, again, seems doable. It is fairly technical to do the first time but not to entirely crazy. Hope that helps, if you have any questions feel free to ask. Nigel