I am fairly new to Magento, and I am trying to get some architectural design advice from someone more knowledgeable on Magento 2.
I want to use Magento to create an e-commerce platform for unique one-off products, where there are never going to be multiple copies of any given product (think of a gemstone, a diamond, or any kind of product that is one of a kind, but shares common attributes with other products in the same family/category).
I want the user to be able to browse all of the products and choose a specific one for purchase, rather than having a generic listing for a type of product. I have access to three third party inventory databases, and I am trying to formulate a strategy for integrating the inventory information from these sources into the Magento database, and into a custom user interface.
My initial thought was to import all items from the three vendor data sources (about 40,000 at this time) as separate products into the Magento Entity-Attribute-Value schema, and map the ~50-75 custom numerical and dropdown attributes from each data source into a custom Magento Attribute Set.
However, upon further investigation, it seems that importing every product as a separate Magento product might cause the system to slow down to a point where it would not be usable for our end users. I have heard of other companies that approached this problem by storing the product information outside of the Magento schema, and only after the user selects a particular product and clicks "Add to Cart", does the system actually create an official Magento product record.
Does anyone have any thoughts on this?
Also, does anyone have a recommendation on an inventory import plugin that could be customized to handle third party REST APIs that return JSON data, as opposed to a CSV, XML, or TXT file? I have found many different options out there that allow for all kinds of custom data import processes and advanced attribute mapping configurations, and support for scheduled import jobs, but I have not found one that supports JSON data coming from web services. Also, if I pick one to start from and customize to support JSON web service data, I can't figure out how to pick the right one. For example:
- https://www.xtento.com/magento-stock-inventory-import-module.html
- http://www.customerparadigm.com/magento-2-0-inventory-synchronization-extension/
Thanks in advance for your help!
Dave
