[Solved] Does inventory management drive you crazy?

[greypanda]

Prestashop is my third attempt to get a usable website working. I started with Ubercart, then Magento, now Prestashop. Of the three, Prestashop is the easiest for the folks managing the store -- they can actually DO things from the GUI.

However, it has not been without many late nights filled with heated ranting and raving. It seems like all these ecommerce products have good intentions -- create a site where you can sell products. The common failure I have experienced is in the management of the inventory. Every one of them makes the importation and maintenance of the products and categories a major chore unless you have a product line that is very stable.Managing more than a few hundred items is unreasonable.

I don't think my criteria are that demanding. We just need the ability to import ( and export ) the product/category database so that new, changed, deleted items can be easily updated. It makes no sense to have to restore the database from an SQL backup when you make a small mistake in the upload.

One final rant. Where is some documentation on what some of the fields in the database actually mean? I had to dig through the code to discover that 1.4 had incorporated Modified Preorder Tree Traversal ( look it up! ) in the category tables. My home-grown exporter fell apart in an instant. I think I invented several new four-letter words to relieve my stress. Excuse me if I missed that in the release notes.