XML Inventory Feeds
June 19, 2007 – 2:08 amDo you float inventory on your site?
Do you want to sell what you don’t have?
Are you too small, with too few cash reserves to buy in large quantities?
Would you like to test a products virility?
If you answered yes to any of these you may want to start hitting up your vendor about “XML inventory feeds”. Get the discussion going and see where it leads. Have your people talk to their people!
This is how it works…
A manufacturer provides a real-time XML inventory file that performs a query on inventory levels for their items and then it is fed into the resellers site. Generally, you use the same model numbers as the manufacturer for database synchronization. The inventory quantities for your products should be updated automatically using the XML feed. (Will also require a means to not query inventory for products that do not come from that manufacturer.
What is XML?
Structured information contains both content (words, pictures, etc.) and some indication of what role that content plays (for example, content in a section heading has a different meaning from content in a footnote, which means something different than content in a figure caption or content in a database table, etc.). Almost all documents have some structure.
A markup language is a mechanism to identify structures in a document. The XML specification defines a standard way to add markup to documents.
More Resources:
http://www.xml.com/pub/a/98/10/guide0.html
http://www.sixapart.com/about/feeds