Send inventory quantity

[jiandian Ni]

We are selling hundred of products in OTC and would expect to send inventory quantity for all products a few time a day. However, per Channel Advisor's API documentation and the persons at Channel Advisor who work with us, it only allow to update the quantity for individual product one-by-one, which means we have to call the same API function hundred times, which does not make sense.  Channel Advisor uses Mirakl's API behind the scene, Mirakl's API allows to send binary array for inventory quantity with one call for all products. Why does CA not support the function to send inventory quantity with one API call for all products?

I would highly appreciate if anybody can shed light: Whether CA has limitation or mislead us.

[Joshua Burns]

My personal experience is that ChannelAdvisor has great salesmen who promise the moon, and deliver Earth rocks.

I've worked with implementations across 3 companies and in every instance, ChannelAdvisor over promised the customer, locked them into multi-year contracts, and delivered an API found to be inferior and borderline worthless for anyone selling more than a hand full of products.

On Wed, Jul 26, 2023 at 2:44 PM jiandian Ni <jiand...@gmail.com> wrote:

We are selling hundred of products in OTC and would expect to send inventory quantity for all products a few time a day. However, per Channel Advisor's API documentation and the persons at Channel Advisor who work with us, it only allow to update the quantity for individual product one-by-one, which means we have to call the same API function hundred times, which does not make sense.  Channel Advisor uses Mirakl's API behind the scene, Mirakl's API allows to send binary array for inventory quantity with one call for all products. Why does CA not support the function to send inventory quantity with one API call for all products?

I would highly appreciate if anybody can shed light: Whether CA has limitation or mislead us.

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[jiandian Ni]

I agree.   CA appears still marketing company, basically post product specifications to search engine, but ready for marketplace channel yet.   Unfortunately the contract was signed.  We are stuck now with quantity feed.  Could you let me know how you send quantity to CA, per individual product or send a binary array for all product/quantities?  CA's person told us we have to send quantity for individual product one-by-one, which means to call the same API hundreds of time when/if we send inventory quantity for hundreds of products, which does not make sense at all.

[Billy]

jiandian I would use the product upload endpoint.  You can upload a file up to 128 MB and it will be processed asynchronously. 

https://knowledge.channeladvisor.com/kc?id=kb_article_view&sys_kb_id=f9ec97c52fd15994cffb5ff62799b61e

Also if you don't have a template you can just export your products to get a template that can be used for the upload

https://knowledge.channeladvisor.com/kc?id=kb_article_view&sys_kb_id=0aec9b491bd5d1d42d9eea40604bcbed

[jiandian Ni]

Hi, Billy, 

Thank you for your help. if so, correct me if I am wrong. 

1. Does this mean to send a file to CA's FTP portal. 

2. If so, we need to define a template that is similar to Import/Export product which includes quantities for all our products.

3. Create an internal program to fill the product information into the CSV file and FTP the file to CA's folder. 

Thanks

[Billy]

1) No, you upload the file via the API (documentation: https://knowledge.channeladvisor.com/kc?id=kb_article_view&sys_kb_id=31ecd7c52fd15994cffb5ff62799b62c)
2) You don't have to define a template, you can just use the default one, that can be retrieved if you use the /v1/ProductExport  (documentation: https://knowledge.channeladvisor.com/kc?id=kb_article_view&sys_kb_id=d6ec97c52fd15994cffb5ff62799b635)
3) Then you can make an internal program to batch up your quantity updates and post the file to the API.

The major downside here is that you should keep checking on the upload status by polling the endpoint to see when it's done.  This is because you need to look at the status to see if there were any errors.  If there were errors you get a url to download a file to view those errors.

It would be nice if CA made an endpoint to do quantity updates in bulk, but as of right now I think this is the most efficient way to do quantity updates for a large amount of products