External Product Catalog

[andrej2k]

Hi,

We are investigating possibility to use KonaKart as e-commerce solution for our customer. One of the strong requirement is that Product Catalog is external and available over Web Services API.

Is it possible to still use KonaKart shopping cart and product presentation GUI with reviews, "...also purchased" functionality? What kind of integration architecture would you suggest?
How integration with the external product catalog can be achieved? Is it implementation of KonaKar Server API that calls WS of external Product Catalog or any other way?

Looking forward for your feedback.
Best regards, Andrej

[trevor]

Are you saying that KK needs to interface to an existing catalog or can the external catalog actually be a KK database?

If the external catalog can be inserted into KK tables then all KK functionality can be made available over web services. Otherwise a common approach is just to keep the two catalogs synchronized using the KK Admin APIs.

[andrej2k]

Our customer whats to have a single Product Catalog instance and avoid possible synchronization problems.
So, initial idea is that external catalog should not be inserted in KK tables.

Are there any other possibilities except synchronization? May be implement part of KK API and redirect calls to external Product Catalog?

[trevor]

That would be very difficult to do . It is standard practice for our customers to have their main catalog in an ERP system and to use the KonaKart database for selling all or some of their products.

All KonaKart Admin functionality is available through APIs and so the synchronization is normally a relatively straightfoward process as long as you can get a trigger/event/callback from the catalog software whenever something is changed.

[Brian]

You can use products in another non-KonaKart catalog but you will miss out on a lot of KonaKart functionality if it doesn't have products in its database, hence it's not a recommended approach.

One possibility is to add the product to the necessary KonaKart tables (using the APIs) once it's placed in the shopping basket.   At least then the product is available for the order process and for the "also purchased" functionality you require.  (Although I don't know what you plan to do with orders in your system so "also purchased" functionality could be implemented outside of KonaKart as well).

I don't know your circumstances completely but synchronisation of catalogs is almost always the better option if possible.   It's not usually that difficult to achieve given the availability of the Admin APIs.

[michaelwechner]

Hi Andrej

We have recently integrated KonaKart with Yanel CMS (http://www.yanel.org) and used KonaKarts SOAP API quite a bit

https://svn.wyona.com/repos/public/yanel/contributions/realms/konakart-yanel-realm

whereas we also have the products within a PostgreSQL DB using KonaKart's DB model.

The end result can be seen here:

http://www.globus.ch/fr/shop/categories/38.html
or
http://www.globus.ch/de/shop/kategorien/38.html

whereas this is probably not exactly what you want, but what I want to say with this, is that depending on how
you combine the KonaKart interfaces with your other data repositories gives you quite some freedom.

Also within the above source code you might find some pointers on how to integrate KonaKart using SOAP API.

HTH

Michael