The program is installed on your own hosting, next to the store, and does one thing: it takes supplier data and puts it into your catalogue. Here is what happens between those two points.
Where the data comes from
The source is the supplier price feed: a link to XML or YML, a CSV file, an Excel workbook. If there is no feed at all, the data is collected from the pages of the supplier site — that is separate work, and it has its own article.
How many items the program handles in one go is decided by your hosting memory, not by the program: parsing a feed costs roughly three times what the file weighs. At 128 MB that is a feed of about thirty thousand items, at 256 MB twice as much. Excel costs the most — the workbook is read whole.
What happens to a product along the way
Each item read goes down a pipeline, and a plugin can change it at every step:
- price — a coefficient per category, a discount, a fixed price per SKU, rounding;
- text — replacing phrases in the title and description, bringing attribute values to one form;
- images — pulling in the pictures the description links to, resizing photos, putting a mark on them;
- meta tags — title, description and keywords from a mask, a separate one per category.
The core itself has no product features: everything above is done by plugins, and each one is switched on separately. What exists today is listed under Plugins.
How the data reaches the store
You cannot write into someone else’s database by guesswork: every engine has its own table layout. So writing is the job of the store driver — a separate class that knows the tables of that particular CMS, and nothing else in the program knows them. Drivers exist for OpenCart 2 and 3, WooCommerce, Shop-Script 8…12 and Joomla JoomShopping. Platforms that cannot be written into directly get a YML feed instead and import it themselves.
The second run and every run after it
The first import creates the products; after that it is an update: on a schedule the program reads the feed again and changes what changed — price, stock, new items.
A product that disappeared from the feed is hidden, not deleted. When it comes back to the feed it comes back to the storefront with its URL, reviews and statistics intact. Deleting it would mean throwing away a page that has already earned something in search.
Each supplier has its own schedule: one who refreshes the feed twice a day does not need hourly checks.
What it needs from hosting
PHP 8.1 or newer, access to the store database and one cron job. Ordinary shared hosting is fine; setting up cron is part of the installation.
To see it on screen, look at the demo. To check it against your own feed, send us a link — you get 20 of your products the way they would land in the store.