If you are asking about how Sophio works, we'll do our best to explain in this article.
Most eCommerce systems assume the merchant will be responsible for building the catalog of products to be sold. This is the major difference between your webstore and your business vs. other non-automotive eCommerce webstores. In fact, you would not be reading this article if you had your own catalog or were able to build your own catalog. Your webstore uses what is referred to as a 'web service' to generate product pages. A web service uses an industry standard format such as XML messaging to send and receive data to and from your website.
When a visitor clicks on the year-make-model widget at your website, your store is asking the catalog web service for a list of years and makes. Once the user selects the year and make, your webstore asks the catalog web service for a list of valid models. Once the visitor chooses the model, your webstore asks for a list of engines. Once the engine is selected, your webstore asks for a list of categories. Each of these 'web service' requests generate data. Your webstore saves these data in a session record for each visitor in a session database table. The system then interacts with this session as the user browses your webstore, and aspects of the data retrieved from the web service are then added to other tables in your database.
Each time a part number is searched on your site, either by SKU or by application (year-make-model), the web service ultimately generates a list of products and their attributes. Just prior to displaying the items, the system adds these data to your webstore's inventory file. If we did not do this, we could not safely allow items to be added to the shopping cart. In other words, we need to validate each click of the 'buy' button against your inventory file. On Day 1 of your webstore installation, your inventory table (file) has ZERO records. If you do a look-up and the system responds with ten items, your inventory file now has ten records, or 'rows'. If you wait a few hours, or even a few seconds and hit the refresh button in your web browser, the system will now update the ten records (not add them). Over time your webstore may collect hundreds of thousands or even millions of records. The important message here, is that your inventory file is always growing and is constantly being updated as it is being used. The power of the system is that you do not have to do anything but understand how it all works.
Now that we got that out of the way, let's talk about a real-world problem and solution. Every modern e-merchant needs to generate inventory/product feeds so that they can submit them to Google, Bing, Yahoo, and other search engines or price-comparison sites. In a perfect world, you would have access to all of your catalog and inventory data from a single source. Unlike a movie, or shirt, an auto part has many uses or 'applications'. Therefore, the creation of a product feed is quite complex. Furthermore, your webstore does not have all of this info at any given moment because of the explanation above. Having said that, the system can, in fact, generate a product feed, but it will only include the info that has been queried at your webstore. If your store is new, the creation of a product feed is a bit premature since you likely will have only a small subset of what you can sell. If your store is mature and has lots of traffic, your product feed is just a few clicks away.
Click here to for the steps on creating a product feed.
