Synching products in different stores - ProductId issue

[KullySupply]

We have plans to create multiple AC stores and we may have certain products on more than one site. To make things easier to manage, I want to use one version of AC as a master database which will hold ALL of our products, and from there I can download site specific products in csv format and upload them to that particular site. Anytime details change for a product, I can alter the info in the master db and upload the updated info to the niche websites.

This is my only problem right now. I have about 250 products that I want to get from "Site A" to "Site B". That is easy enough using DataPort, but the products end up having different ProductId's on both sites.

Is there any way I can set the ProductId for a new product when uploading csv files through DataPort? If anyone else out there uses a master database for multiple sites, I'd love to hear how you handle this problem.

-Greg

[jmestep]

You can retain the numbering when importing a new store, but retaining it for a product import would have to be custom coded. The product ids in Able 7 are assigned based on an auto-numbering field in the database and that would have to be turned off, products uploaded, numbering turned on and possibly other tables affected if other data is based on the product id.
It might not be a bad thing with different product ids, since your bookkeeping probably runs by SKU or manufacturer number? At least the product URLS for the sites would be different, which might help you to not get penalized by search engines for duplicate content. You might want to juggle words in your product names around some also.

[KullySupply]

Thanks for the heads up regarding having multiple sites with identical content... that hadn't crossed my mind!

It might not be a bad thing with different product ids, since your bookkeeping probably runs by SKU or manufacturer number?

But DataPort uses the ProductId to determine whether a row within an uploaded csv file is a new product, or just one that needs updating, right? Using the SKU would make much more sense, I just don't know how that would work. I'd probably have to custom code that...