At work we are building this inventory aggregate system.  Every dealer has some sort of inventory management software be it online or offline. With this project we are working with those software vendors to display a dealers inventory on the manufacturers website. There was already an existing in place built years ago with only a few feeds available. It was also built in Ruby on Rails which would not be compatible with the new effort.

What I have found is that many of these software companies have already solved this issue. Either their own systems offer a website that works in similar fashion or other companies have come to them to build a feed aggregator but not necessarily for a manufacturer.

With the online feeds we are able to go out and grab an XML feed and pull in inventory. The way the offline systems solved this issue is by running scheduled tasks to create a file and the FTP it to the requested server.

Thankfully these software vendors have been nice to work with. Some have built the feeds specifically for us to use while others have provided support to using their API or explaining the process for getting the file uploaded.

While going through a sample XML file provided by one vendor I came across this “option” for a particular unit. It only costed an extra $56.00.

Inflatable Doll In Closet

We got a good laugh at that. I did have to go through the file and remove 5 more of these. It would be really bad for the client to see this in a demo. The vendor has also removed those bits from their example file. It makes me wonder if any other company has been given this file and found those entries.