advice

marlyman

Hi

I am trying to design a website for my company. We sell automotive products. Im having a problem with product catagories. for example i have one filter that fits 16 different manufactures vehicles. And this product fits multiple models for each manufactures. It also has a different OEM number for each manufacturer.

My question really is Zencart and the likes are unable to handle this kind of "floating key" catagorisation of products where you can start your search by defining manufacturer->model->section on car->product, or using section on car->manufacturer->list of product.

Am i making any sense?

Marly

willows

with car parts sites you have a fundamental question at the very start of the project , is the search for a part going to be.

1 brakepad 2 skoda 3 fabia 4 1999 - 2005

or is it going to be

1 skoda 2 fabia 3 1999 - 2005 4 brake pads

The standard mix of cats and manufactors will not do here.

You'll need on the product a make model and year column.

Carparts sites usually have about 25,000 line items minimum for OEM parts, so you cannot contemplate editing by hand through the browser. You have to develop a set of csv readers to update products from excel sheets so as to keep it all manageable.

There are some good car reg lookups that can be associated with search too, so the customer inserts their car reg adn all the relevant parts show for their car.

How do I know, we have done 3 of these sites before. 1 in magento ( not a good idea at all ) and 2 in a heavily moded zencart ( a much better idea ) .