A Broad Background

Matthew has worked with two leading software development companies, MarketWorks and more recently eSellerPro. He knows the best ways of editing product and business related data from experience to ensure maximum efficiency and effective deployment.

Fresh Thinking
Matthew for example, just by not mentioning the dreaded term ‘Magento’, opens the development project to less expensive development teams, takes the huge complexity and equally huge cost away from Magento data manipulations by processing data outside of Magento and using universal import and export options to put the data back into ‘Magento’ when required. Now you’ll never hear someone suggest that for dealing with Magento.

‘Matt Proof’

Matthew is an expert with MS Excel, can write VBA, iMacros, PHP and JavaScript by hand, however he knows that there is no point in adding complexity, if the lowest skilled user cannot use it. That’s why Matthew has coined the term ‘Matt proof’.

If it cannot be used by a complete novice with simple instructions, then its not right and needs to be worked on further.

Leading By Example

Obviously due to NDA’s he cannot mention company names or suppliers, however here are a few examples of recent projects Matthew has completed.

SOAP Integration
Working with a SOAP interface via PHP to poll for stocklevels of products are certain times each day and return them as a CSV file via FTP for collection in to a third party system.

Stock counts were not the only concern, the returned data was in XML, however needed manipulation to deal with the complexities of sized and colour variation products into a format that could be used by a third party system to create the starting inventory structure for staff to then back fill with further product related information.

iMacros Scraping
Matthew joked around with iMacros when trying to contact a company that was proving to less than customer friendly in this article. However rather than just spamming contact forms, iMacros also has a far more serious side to it…

Anything and I mean anything that is on a web page can be scraped, then manipulated, stored or a decision can be made on how to then progress. A recent project involved navigating a suppliers website (with their consent, it was technically restrictive for them to provide database access) to take the latest pricing, product data, images, then report them back into a CSV file for further manipulation in MS Excel, then using VBA, the edited files are transferred via FTP for use on multiple sales channels.

Another project required the scraping of data from competitors listings (from well known auction sites), cleansing and then delivery back in a format that could be used by the client.

CSV to MySQL to multiple CSV files
This project was a really interesting one, as speed of deployment was absolutely required and the final solution was very ‘slick’.

A very large CSV file was provided by a supplier (updated on each fetch) which then needed to be thinned out, manipulated and then distributed into multiple files for multiple sales channels. Using a previously created parsing script, the entire CSV file was loaded into a MySQL database every 30 minutes, then 15 minutes later (its a monster file, it needs a 10 minute buffer), several PHP scripts are run that then process the data as required and create files for external systems.

MS Excel
I’m sharing this example, as it caught me out due to an oversight and I’ve not been caught out since for the same issue again. Using an excel file that is emailed to a client each day, an ‘inventory creation’ sheet was made for import into a backend system for listing on to multiple marketplaces.

On face value this was a straight forward project, take the latest data, manipulate and create a set of sheets for importing to an external system. However we were quickly caught out by finding that the data emailed each day, was not including stock that was sold out, just that days items. So using an export from the backend system, we were able to cross compare todays stock with yesterdays, then not only creating new records or updating existing records, another file was created as an ‘exception file’ for importing, that took the missing items off sale.

Contact Matthew Today

If you know what you are looking for or are in need of guidance contact Matthew today, he will be able to assist you with any questions or queries you may have.