Magento as a product information management (PIM) tool for multiple marketplaces (ebay, amazon, Rakuten, etc)

Question

We are selling products on over 10 different platforms, each of which has different category sets. Also, we are selling internationally and a product can belong to different categories on different country shops of the same platform. For example, category A on eBay UK and category B on eBay FR. So the case is, considering the country shops we have, at most a product can belong to 36 different categories in the PIM system that we wish to develop a Magento CE into.

A category is corresponding to an attribute set. I think it is possible that we import all attribute sets from those platforms to PIM. However, a product in Magento can only be assgined to one attribute set, which means I need to first combine over 10 attribute sets into one and then assign it to the product. That is too much of work and might overwhelm the system.

Is there a solution to what we want to do with the system? Is it possible to have multiple attribute sets for a single product without actually creating a new big combined attribute set? Or, can we create multiple products in the system for the identical product, each for a store view? (website=platform, store=store view=country shop) so that I can assign each of them a smaller attribute set on platform level. I know Magento was not designed this way, but is it worth trying?

Thank you in advance for any help!

Answer 1

Welcome 李程腾 to MageOverflow!

Why do you want to misuse an ecommerce system like magento as a PIM? What about using something like:

• http://www.akeneo.com/
• https://www.pimcore.org

Is there a solution to what we want to do with the system?

You can do ANYTHING with magento - How big is your budget? I think you know what I mean.

Is it possible to have multiple attribute sets for a single product without actually creating a new big combined attribute set?

No, I don't see any way to do this. Magento is not designed to use multiple attribute sets, therefore you have to rewrite the whole system - bad idea.

Or, can we create multiple products in the system for the identical product, each for a store view? (website=platform, store=store view=country shop) so that I can assign each of them a smaller attribute set on platform level.

If the products have different SKUs you can try this. But having multiple magento products for the same product is absurd. If you do this, after finishing the project, you need a PIM :-p

I know Magento was not designed this way, but is it worth trying?

No.

Answer 2

Well, using Magento as a PIM solution will not be very convenient. You can easily try using Akeneo for managing your product information. You can find connectors for your Magento Store like :

Magento 2 Akeneo Connector: This connector performs both operations of Import and Export. Say for eg you want to manage the product information, you can easily import the products from your Magento Store to Akeneo. You can then add multiple attributes and assign them in single or multiple categories.

Once the product enrichment is done, you can run the export job, which will all your products directly to your Magento Store. You can even add custom attributes and export them too.

If you are running your store in Magento 1.9, you can consider using this:

Magento Akeneo Connector: As of now, you can use this connector only for export the products.

Answer 3

I think to implement just Magento, it is not enough if you want to manage product information for different marketplaces simultaneously. It is more suitable to use PIM systems such as Akeneo or TreoPIM. If we to talk about TreoPIM there are connectors for Magento 1 and Magento 2. In any case they ensure an automatic bilateral data import and export.