A recent implementation of Sunshop involved getting thousands of products into Sunshop from a wholesale inventory file. The wholesaler had very high level category arrangements that wouldn’t work for a online store. The store needed many more categories and sub-categories. This meant either a) using the Sunshop admin interface to move the items one by one (yikes!), or b) writing MySQL database queries to move product in bulk to their newly defined categories. Even the query approach was extremely labor intensive, as the shop owner continued to refine his categories, and I was writing dozens of queries a week to keep up. We needed a better tool.
I created a utility for Sunshop which gives the shop owner a custom interface for moving products between categories in bulk. It allows him to pick the source category, the destination category, and apply a filter to the product descriptions. The utility shows him a list of products that match his source category and description filter. He can select one, many, or all of the products that meet his criteria and move them to the new category.
Here’s what the utility looks like:
The shop owner was able to quickly get his products moved where he wanted them, and I was saved from writing endless MySQL queries.