New Magento Based Site Launched with Advanced Catalogue Handling.

This week has seen the full launch of 247Electrical.co.uk. The site is based on Magento and the specific requirements where that it needs to be able to handle a large scale catalogue with frequent updates whilst still enjoying all the fancy features such as layered navigation and custom attributes.

As Magento’s own bulk catalogue handling tools are a little bit underpowered and overbloated, the solution was to create a standalone system for handling csv file uploads and then pushing this data across to the Magento database directly without that much interaction with the Magento codebase. We have managed to achieve product insert times (including building category structure and handling custom attributes) of around 0.1 second per product.

The result is a large fully featured catalogue that can be torn down and rebuilt in a matter of minutes. Stock and Price information can be updated even faster, with a full catalogue stock and price level update taking only a matter of seconds.