Supplier API product import with markup and category mapping

The challenge

A European web agency was supporting a Bulgarian online retailer that sources stock from a wholesale supplier. The supplier publishes its catalogue through an API, but keeping the retailer's store in line with it by hand meant re-entering products, prices and images whenever the supplier changed anything.

The retailer's store ran on an older platform release, and the agency wanted a separate PHP script it could run independently of the store's own code, which would create new products, update existing ones, apply the retailer's margin and place every item in the right store category, all with Bulgarian-language content.

What we did

• API product import. We wrote a standalone script that fetches the supplier's products and images and creates or updates the matching products in the store.
• Automatic pricing. The script applies a configurable percentage markup to the supplier's price, so the retailer's margin is built in on every import.
• Category mapping. We added an admin field where each store category can be linked to a supplier category ID, so imported products land in the correct place.
• Category import. Supplier categories can also be imported to speed up the initial set-up.
• Localised content. Product data is written in Bulgarian to match the storefront.
• Testing and hand-over. We built and tested the script on a demo store running the same platform version, then explained to the agency how to run it and configure the category links.

Tech stack

PHP, MySQL, OpenCart 1.5.4, supplier XML API