Intelligent imports into PrestaShop

In the opinion of many users, Merlin Backoffice Flex was already the most powerful, flexible and rapid catalog import module available for PrestaShop.
Now, SITOLOG has gone one step further, adding the concept of "Current Values" columns.
There are innovations that can change your everyday life. This is certainly one of them.
I'm very proud to introduce "Intelligent Imports" from Merlin Backoffice Flex, starting with version 2.2.2, available very soon.

What's an "intelligent" import? ?

It's an import of data from a file that adapts its own behavior, line by line, according to data previously read from the PrestaShop database, the "Current Values".

An example to make this more concrete: you have a file with two columns, product references and new prices to be updated. Before importing the lines, you can ask Merlin to read the value of the current stock in your PrestaShop store for each of them, and depending on whether or not it's close to zero, ask it to apply certain behaviors, such as :

-If out of stock, deactivate product.
-If close to 0, increase the selling price indicated in the file by x%.
-If a lot of unsold stock, lower the price, or even apply a discount.

Some possible uses

The number of use cases for this novelty is almost infinite, and it's up to you and your imagination to set up previously unimaginable automated scenarios.

Here are just a few examples:

Access a missing item in the file

For example, you have a file of declinations for your entire site, i.e. multiple suppliers, with a column of supplier references to be imported or modified.
Merlin Backoffice Flex will refuse to do the import if the file does not contain a column with the default suppliers of the parent product of each declination.
All you need to do now is add a virtual column during the mapping stage, link it to the product's "Default supplier" heading and use the new option to indicate that it is a "Current value" column.
When reading the file, Merlin Backoffice Flex will then act as if the file contained a column containing the default supplier identifiers.

Modify a value only if not defined

You could already, column by column, ask Merlin Backoffice Flex to use it or not when modifying items already created. This is very useful, for example, if you don't want to overwrite product descriptions that you've manually optimized after the first import.

You can now act more finely: if the product already created already has a description, leave it alone; if it doesn't, import the one provided in the file.

Modify a value according to the current value of another item

E.g. Activate/hide, according to current stocks

This is the case in the first example chosen above. It is often necessary to adapt product availability, prices or messages to be displayed in the store, depending on the quantity currently available, product by product, or declination by declination.

Calculate values to be imported using current values from other fields as parameters

Example: specific margin rate, product by product. Your file contains a column with the recommended margin rate or margin coefficient, product by product. Ask Merlin Backoffice Flex to read the purchase price from the database, use it to calculate the new selling price to comply with the recommended margin and update it.

Filter lines to import or ignore

For example, from a multi-supplier file, you can update only the products of a certain supplier, registered in PS, while the supplier information for the items is not available in the file.

Distinguishing duplicates

E.g.: filter products with the same part number, distinguishing them by brand

It's often the case that you have products from different brands in your catalog, which have nothing to do with each other, but which have the same part number.
You want to use this reference column as an import synchro key (to identify the products to be modified).
Up to now, it wasn't possible for Merlin to understand which one was concerned when several were found with this common reference.
Now you can ask it to read the brand of each product in the database and modify only those whose brand is the same as that in your file.

Copy an item to another

Example: converting a store currently exempt from VAT into a VAT-registered store, without changing prices.

 

All you have to do is change the "Sales price" column to a "Current values" type column (always read exclusive of VAT, since VAT does not exist in the database) and import it into the "Sales price incl. VAT" section.

Automate recurring mass modification actions

If you're a happy user of Merlin Backoffice's mass editing tools, such as MagicEdit or MagicFormula, you may have found yourself having to manually run repetitive processes with these tools day after day, and regretting that you couldn't schedule them automatically.

What if this were now possible with the "Current values" columns, using the import scheduler?
We'll tell you more soon with a tutorial.

How to make smart imports?

It's very simple: to fill a mapped column with the current values read from the database, all you need to do is tick a box in step 2: