performance and catalogs

[sashwill]

We are still considering the use of Konakart however these concerns were brought up at our review meeting. 

Would the Konakart experts be able to take a moment to address these questions?

How difficult is it to have multiple catalogs? We feel the single catalog limitation may be a problem. It could possibly limit our options in the future or add unwanted complexity in order to achieve the desired results. Or perhaps we are stuck in old ideas, how do you suggest we handle multiple vendors, each with thousands of items?

Is there a recommended maximum of inventory items? What is the maximum number of items that have successfully been tested in inventory while still achieving satisfactory results?

Is it possible to special order "non-catalog" items?  Konakart's main purpose for us would be to sell inventory from our warehouse, however we also buy parts on an as-needed basis. Is it possible to create a free-form order item?

Thank you in advance.

[Brian]

Hi,

You should have no performance problems with thousands of items.

For "vendors" I'm not sure what you mean.  Is that manufacturers or are you talking about a multi-store KonaKart?

If vendors == maufacturers then there's no problems with performance here either.


For orderiing "non-catalog items" you can create a few different solutions.  For example:

• You could create an "invisible" non-catalog item product.
  
• Create a form to capture this free text order request. 


• On submit of this form, create an order - setting it to a certain unique order status - use the non-catalog item product for the order and set the free text comments from the user to the comments field in the orderStatusHistory.


• You could drive workflow based on the order status change and do something like alert an administrator to take action on these special orders.

Does that make any sense to you?!

--Brian

[julie]

I'd just like to add that we've added an interface to Solr which is an open source enterprise search server based on the Lucene Java search. This will make search lightning fast even for large catalogs.

[julie]

Hi,

Here's a French site using KonaKart with about 10,000 items http://www.e-citynet.com/boutique .