zacklawhon

@pertorstensson, I did not set it to Resolved nor did I find a worthwhile fix. Basically, I have simply taken the advice of the @icaleb in which I use Custom Attributes for things like UPC, EAN, GPID, MPN, ASIN and so on. You know, the types of information that all products on planet Earth will have but will never be shared by any two items.

@ikaras, it’s not actually listed on there. Check the box that says Search every custom field:(metadata). Then it will search SKU. I also use ATUM inventory as a plugin and the search works on that but, it complicates WC so if you don’t need it don’t use it. Hope that helps!

@ikaras, I was able to work around it by installing the Search Everything plugin. It is easily found. It is working right on the backend for SKUs only.

Claudiu, will it fix the meta_data search in general or just SKU?

I have looked into this further and Woocommerce is not searching ANY META data at all. So only information in the post body or title can be found.

Awesome! It’s a great plugin and huge time saver! Looking forward to that feature!

Caleb, ok but that eliminates the efficiency in having to select the attributes from a list not to mention making use of plugins that set default attributes. Since you guys are defending the change so adamantly, can I ask what reason there was to make this change? How did it improve the software?

Mike, there are attributes that are known to us in the retail world as “identifiers”, these attributes will have a unique value for every item. Such as Unified Product Codes (UPC), European Article Numbers (EAN), and Manufacturer’s Part Number (MPN). The value of these attributes is how we distinguish between very similar items. Using only “select” attributes would require that each UPC, EAN, and MPN be added to the “terms” of the attribute either before or after product creation, then assigned to the item. Worse still, the database cell containing the “terms” for the UPC, EAN, and MPN attributes would contain every possible UPC, EAN, and MPN. WooCommerce and WordPress take long enough to load each page, that wouldn’t help.

Are these the kinds of changes I can expect from Woocommerce?

Ok, I just attempted an import with a fresh report, on a single item.

After pulling the report from Amazon, I chose to “select rows to process” then selected a single item. That item was set to “import” and showed the SKU as 13011718, and the ASIN as B015TUOGPA, all of which was correct. I then clicked “process selected rows, which reloaded the page with a message that said “1 item added to import queue”. I then clicked the Process button, the import screen popped up and the import completed without any errors or messages. But, after the import, I went to check the item and the SKU had been set to B01DFXJM0C.

Worse yet, WP-Lister created and associated a new listing with the SKU it made. So now I have an extra listing that is not connected to any of my inventory management systems because the SKU doesn’t match the convention.

Matt, if you would like to me move this discussion to the support ticket system I will, but these kinds of things should be public incase another user runs into this problem before it is fixed and WP-Lister is updated. I am a developer too and I get not wanting this out there but, regardless of our feelings about our work, “open source” sort of requires transparency in development.

• This reply was modified 6 years, 9 months ago by zacklawhon. Reason: Forgot to add other points

My server logs every server error and ever PHP error. I just reviewed the log from the day I installed WP-Lister and there are no 503 errors or PHP errors related to this. The only errors listed are

PHP Deprecated:  Automatically populating $HTTP_RAW_POST_DATA is deprecated and will be removed in a future version. To avoid this warning set 'always_populate_raw_post_data' to '-1' in php.ini and use the php://input stream instead. in Unknown on line 0

I’m looking into whether or not that error is related to this issue. That error has occurred once per day since I installed wordpress. There are no other sites or frameworks running on this server. I am about to attempt the import again with a fresh report. I’ll post what happens.

• This reply was modified 6 years, 9 months ago by zacklawhon. Reason: Spelling error fixed

The 503 error is an error caused by your host. A 503 error is defined as:

The Web server (running the Web site) is currently unable to handle the HTTP request due to a temporary overloading or maintenance of the server. The implication is that this is a temporary condition which will be alleviated after some delay

Doesn’t that refer to the server throwing the error, meaning that Amazon is returning the 503, not my server. If it is my server, does that mean code within WP-Lister is causing the error? I can’t imagine how that is possible unless the requests made to Amazon are GET and the URI is too long. But even that shouldn’t be caught by my server.

Matt, when you imported the item, did you already have an item listed on Amazon with a custom SKU or did you just import the listing and allow WP-Lister to create a SKU?

John, as for the preview of the report, everything is correct there, on every single line. I noticed that if the item has to be IMPORTED then, WP-Lister uses an ASIN as the SKU, but if the item is to be UPDATED everything works fine. So, I am pre-creating all items in Woocommerce to match what I have listed on Amazon, then I will attempt the complete import again. I’ll post my results when finished.

• This reply was modified 6 years, 10 months ago by zacklawhon.

Thanks for the reply John. I did contact the host about the 503 error, they had my requests limited for some reason, that is now resolved.

As for the other issue, I did use the report method. Half of the items were created with their proper SKUs and the other half was not. I deleted all items that had the ASIN as the SKU and ran the report again. This time again about half of the remaining items were created with their proper SKUs, the others used the ASIN. I can not tell if an error occurred during the import but it looks like it may be related to the 503 error. I will mark this as resolved since I can not duplicate it reliably. If I am able to recreate it or discover the root issue, I will post another issue separately.

Update: I am trying to run the importer again and now all of the items are returning this message: Couldn’t fetch URL https://www.amazon.com/dp/B01DTD4VL8/ – server returned error code 503

Some are returning that message more than 10 times all with different ASINs.

• This reply was modified 6 years, 10 months ago by zacklawhon.

Thanks for the quick reply Pavel. I think I understand the PO system now. That should work just fine for me. As for the other, I may be able to offer some insight on how that should work if you need it. I have been a PHP developer for over 10 years and I have also been managing a multi-channel seller for about 9 years. I know it is impossible to offer anyone the perfect solution but, there must be many industries that can benefit from the many supplier->one product model and the need to store supplier SKUs. Your plugin is awesome and I think it will easily become THE inventory management plugin for WC/WP. I think you could manage both the Suppliers and Supplier SKUs from the wp-term-taxonomy/wp-term-relationships/wp-terms tables as the Supplier and Supplier SKU would always just relate to Posts. That way you could have both the one-to-many and many-to-many relationships covered. How exactly you display, change, update, or set the status of these suppliers and skus…..not sure. Anyway, let me know if I can help the team at all (totally free by the way). I will mark this post as Resolved.