CE Phoenix Cart Forum

I'm trying to push Phoenix forward in terms of shopowner benefits. Part of that is automation of processes.

If any part of your day to day can be automated, please share your ideas.

Even just 5 minutes saved per day adds up to 30 hours over a year - that's a whole extra day to re-invest back into your business!!

Most important - and a real timesaver - would probabaly be for me a bullet-proof price-updater by importing CSV file. We coded one in the past for old OSC - but I could never make it realy good.

My outline - workflow :

- Have a page in admin to select supplier
- After chosing supplier - the page gives all products of this supplier.
- Import/upload CSV to server
- Check CSV and give a choice to select columns
- Reload page based on EAN in db / current data
- Reload page with each line giving the selected details of the product with the current data and a new line with the new data from CSV.
- Mark differences (eg gross price - nett price) and recommend new gross price - nett price.
- Have a button on each line to accept recommended data or enter new data (eg a rounded price) manually
- After this line has been altered / submitted - remove that line from page (Ajax) so we can work the next line
- Also have possiblity to update 10 lines a time

This is the simple workflow - it was more complicated and had more requirements (eg have a table price history for recording the data price / date of update / auto or manual etc) but for now this might be complictad enough

-Maybe some sort of auto db-backup?
-Sync currencies

For stores with PWA:
-Delete old non-deleted PWA-accounts

Not really automation, but a way to delete all expired specials would be handy at times.

//Daniel

Hi;
Bulk upload of products via a CSV or another convenient way, rather than each individual input.
The columns to pull from the CSV (related to sql columns) can be added on the from a master controller based on addons. That would be a automated way to get things working faster and save time.
Also Download , edit and upload on the same.

Regds./
radhavallabh

Kofod95 wrote: ↑Thu Aug 14, 2025 12:22 pm -Maybe some sort of auto db-backup?


//Daniel

+1

Kofod95 wrote: ↑Thu Aug 14, 2025 12:22 pm Not really automation, but a way to delete all expired specials would be handy at times.

This could be as simple as a Hook (to create a button in specials.php) and an Action (to delete expired specials) when that button is pressed. No core code changes needed, I think.

This idea of CSV download/edit/upload is explored a bit here;
viewtopic.php?f=10&t=2949

I did it in specials.php for Proof of Concept, as this is a simple page with a simple DB structure.

There must be some really dull and boring part of your day-to-day shopowning experience...that can be eased?

FOR EXAMPLE

Let's say you get 20 orders overnight;

admin > orders.php
select the earliest of the overnight orders
click "invoice"
wait.
print it
click "packing slip"
wait
print it
back to admin > orders.php

Repeat 20 times.

How long? Let's say 20 minutes.

Instead, do this;

admin > batch

select the 20 orders
click print invoice
click print packing slip

How long: 1 minute

There must be more processes that are so dull like this, that we can make easier?

Our biggest time waster is adding tracking information when we update the order status and then need to do the same to update Paypal. We use order comments to add in tracking data which gets added to the order status update email. On days we have over 40-50 orders and it takes time to manually enter this info. No idea how to automate it though.

The PayPal bit is just something we have to do to keep them happy. No idea whether there is an API they use to do this so again no idea how automate.

One of our biggest problems was things like keyword research when creating new product listings. We have figured out how to use AI for that so its not too bad. We also use AI to crunch data so we know which items are selling. All we needed to do was to create a list of all products with numbers sold over 1, 2, 3, 6 ands 12 months and it now produces data on the information we give it. Improving some of the outdated reports not so much to change them too much, but more to update the data they give so they an be more effective, and help the store owner more, but thats not really an automated thing.

No idea how to automate it though.

Export CSV from your shipping company - and upload the CSV - Read out the data and update tracking field .. not to complicated IMHO.

We coded it ourself in the old osc days - haven't yet tried in Phoenix.

But would be a must-have for Phoenix.