[Techie]

Hi All

We own a store that sells thousands of car related products.

We tried the free software and found it to have one of the best menus and was easy to work with

Written on the Ecwid's features page is unlimited categories and unlimited subcategories, so we decided to pay for the silver account.

Upon purchasing the silver account, we started to upload the car covers, but when we approched 1000 categories we received this message:

"Ecwid has a limitation of 1000 categories per store. Your store already has 839 categories and your import file contains 240 new categories. In order to prevent breaking a limitation your file will not be imported. To import that file, please minimize the number of categories in your store or your import file."

Have we done something wrong or is it like ISP's who say " You have unlimited downloads", but when you look deeper into the small print you get a fair use policy and you are in fact capped?

The site is live at the moment for all to view, so that you can see how our menu works.

The cars themselves have to be the categories, and there are over 18,000 cars to upload, meaning 18,000 categories, with a couple of thousand products shared between them.

Any help would be appreciated as we were hoping to launch on the 6th of August, to coincide with a special event. We were just going to upload a selection car covers for the time being which is just under 10,000 lines of csv.

At the moment we are stumped.

We have searched for hours on Ecwid's Forums, Knowledge, Ideas page, but found not one single related article, so is it just us?

Does anyone know where we are going wrong?

Thank you in advance.

Regards

Josh

[Qetzal]

Hi Josh,

First of all please accept my deepest apologies for this situation. We, Ecwid Team, could have made all necessary steps to prevent it from happening, but didn't. We're really sorry.

Please let me describe why the error appears.

1. Limit of number of categories.
At this moment all Ecwid plans have a limit of max categories number. Any store can have no more than 1,000 categories.
It's our fault that we didn't pay enough attention to it and didn't mention this limit clearly. Sorry for this.
We have already fixed this oversight and added the necessary information to our site: http://www.ecwid.com/compare-plans.html

2. Why does Ecwid have this limit?
Two of our main goals are speed and perfomance. We want Ecwid to be a very fast shopping cart, faster than any other carts on the market. Ecwid is already fast, but unfortunately such speed brings some limitations.

What will happen if we add many categories, for example 30,000? Will Ecwid servers be able to manage them?
Actually, yes, our servers can handle thousands of categories. Our servers are powerful, so they aren't the problem. The problem is _browsers_.

As you know Ecwid is an AJAX application. All its content is generated dynamically, on the fly. Unfortunately some browsers (e.g. IE) have the very slow JavaScript and HTML rendering engines, so they process big amounts of data very slowly. As a result, if you add tens thousands of categories, such browser will just fail to process them. The Ecwid storefront and backend will become unresponsible. We cannot allow it, that's why Ecwid has such a limitation.

Actually we already face such problems sometimes: http://www.ecwid.com/bt/view.php?id=3314 and have to implement some tricky workarounds to fix the problems (the problem which is described in bugtracker was caused by 700 categories only!). Unfortunately some browsers are too slow and too outdated : - /

We thought that 1000 categories will be enough for our merchants. Actually you're the first Ecwid user who reported about this limit. Well, it looks we were wrong.

3. What should we do?
I understand that the problem exists and should be fixed. I think some workarounds are available, so please contact me at ene@ecwid.com and describe how you want to set up your category and product structure.
I will do the best to help you to fix this problem.

Sorry for the troubles again.

[Simon Wright]

Hi Qetzel



We have recently designed a store for one of our clients, and have just fallen into this 1000 categories barrier due to client additions above and beyond the initial brief.

We need to be able to populate maybe another 500 categories if that is possible?

Our clients store is: guestandphilips.co.uk

And it is run under the silver package at the moment. The navigational design and implementation is deferent to your usual customers as far as I can see. I'm hoping that is negates some of the speed issues discussed above?

I'll look forward to your reply asap. Thanks.



Regards Andy Boyes

[Techie]

A very long time and no hear.

I hope you remember me and my site, way back in Sept 2009, I broke the 1000 barrier for the first time.

I received this today.
http://www.ecwid.com/forums/showthre...

I have replied there as well.

I was pondering the same question, only the other day. then I received this email about the same thoughts. Scary, considering its the first email from you guys in 2 years, may be a good omen, I do hope so.

3 years later and over £10K spent on web development, no one seems to be able to produce the kind of web site I need, so I am back doing it myself.

Back to the 1000 max categories again.

But I have learned heaps since then and I found filters.

As we could not get it to work with your software, as you know, we had to try something else, X Cart Gold promised the world to us....Humm... not quite.... Hideous back end, totally confusing...

I bought X Cart Gold and I not happy with it, so I bought their filter, that's OK, but to upgrade I have to pay them all over again, for the site and filter. The damn thing was never launched, so being cheesed off with the lack of support from X Cart, so I am back here.

So what I think I need are filters, to keep my categories slimmer and the sites smoother running.

See my site (open for you) www.techautos.co.uk

It has two categories at the moment.

If you click on CAR COVERS, you get presented with a filter, at the top of the page which is OK, but limited to what you can do with it, like placement, style...
But it's X Cart and slow to start off, about 5 to 10 seconds per section, but once its been through once, it speeds up. Its quicker on my Android. Oh and the PC is a Workstation with 2 x duo core chips and 8 gigs of ram and a high end NVIDIA Quattro video card, so its not a slug, but the site is still slow on any pc.

The other problem with it is the FILTER button takes ages to appear so your wondering what to do next, so its not brilliant.
It's also stuck at the end and unmovable too.
I would prefer it to be there but faded till its needed.

I was thinking of categorising the manufactures names, making about 150 in total, way under your limit, in my mind that seems to be the better way to go, if I am correct the filter then sifts through only that manufacturers (categories) data, or am I wrong?

So my question is, do you have filters that can work faster than X Cart's poor effort and what is the max lines of data you recommend for them to sift though without slowing down too much.

Hope to hear from some one fairly soon.

if the answer is a good one, then we are back in business. Thankfully.

Thanks in advance

Regard

Josh

+44 2081 443355 Office
+44 7759 669 001 Mobile / Cell
Skype Phone:- techautosuk
info@techautos.co.uk
www.carcoversinternational.com
http://www.facebook.com/Techautosuk
http://stores.shop.ebay.co.uk/Tech-Autos-UK
Hours of business 12.00 to 05.00 GMT / BST

[Eugene Rimmer]

Originally Posted by Techie

A very long time and no hear.

I hope you remember me and my site, way back in Sept 2009, I broke the 1000 barrier for the first time.

I received this today.
http://www.ecwid.com/forums/showthre...

I have replied there as well.

I was pondering the same question, only the other day. then I received this email about the same thoughts. Scary, considering its the first email from you guys in 2 years, may be a good omen, I do hope so.

3 years later and over £10K spent on web development, no one seems to be able to produce the kind of web site I need, so I am back doing it myself.

Back to the 1000 max categories again.

But I have learned heaps since then and I found filters.

As we could not get it to work with your software, as you know, we had to try something else, X Cart Gold promised the world to us....Humm... not quite.... Hideous back end, totally confusing...

I bought X Cart Gold and I not happy with it, so I bought their filter, that's OK, but to upgrade I have to pay them all over again, for the site and filter. The damn thing was never launched, so being cheesed off with the lack of support from X Cart, so I am back here.

So what I think I need are filters, to keep my categories slimmer and the sites smoother running.

See my site (open for you) www.techautos.co.uk

It has two categories at the moment.

If you click on CAR COVERS, you get presented with a filter, at the top of the page which is OK, but limited to what you can do with it, like placement, style...
But it's X Cart and slow to start off, about 5 to 10 seconds per section, but once its been through once, it speeds up. Its quicker on my Android. Oh and the PC is a Workstation with 2 x duo core chips and 8 gigs of ram and a high end NVIDIA Quattro video card, so its not a slug, but the site is still slow on any pc.

The other problem with it is the FILTER button takes ages to appear so your wondering what to do next, so its not brilliant.
It's also stuck at the end and unmovable too.
I would prefer it to be there but faded till its needed.

I was thinking of categorising the manufactures names, making about 150 in total, way under your limit, in my mind that seems to be the better way to go, if I am correct the filter then sifts through only that manufacturers (categories) data, or am I wrong?

So my question is, do you have filters that can work faster than X Cart's poor effort and what is the max lines of data you recommend for them to sift though without slowing down too much.

Hope to hear from some one fairly soon.

if the answer is a good one, then we are back in business. Thankfully.

Thanks in advance

Regard

Josh

+44 2081 443355 Office
+44 7759 669 001 Mobile / Cell
Skype Phone:- techautosuk
info@techautos.co.uk
www.carcoversinternational.com
http://www.facebook.com/Techautosuk
http://stores.shop.ebay.co.uk/Tech-Autos-UK
Hours of business 12.00 to 05.00 GMT / BST

Unfortunately, filters functionality is not yet available in Ecwid, but we are seriously looking to add it in the near future. Our developers are currently laying the necessary foundation for the filters. This functionality will be released with one of the upcoming versions of Ecwid (not with the closest release though, unfortunately). It will soon be possible to filter products with a specific set of properties by addressing your Ecwid store with a specific URL, so you can develop a filter for your Ecwid shop soon. Please, vote for this idea to get notified when that functionality is released in Ecwid: http://ideas.ecwid.com/forums/22031-... or just stay tuned for the updates on the new releases, which we announcer in our blog: http://ecwid.com/blog

[Techie]

Hi Eugene

That is such a shame.

Then I am at a loss as to what to do next.

I really thought two years would have seen some real changes to to your software.

Do you have any time frame on the filters, as I do need to know whether to hold off and wait or seek the software elsewhere.

This statement
"It will soon be possible to filter products with a specific set of properties by addressing your Ecwid store with a specific URL, so you can develop a filter for your Ecwid shop soon."

I do not understand this, can you explain to me how your filter would work.
Is it not the same as the one i use in XCart?
Sorry I am still leaning.

Thanks

Josh

[Eugene Rimmer]

Originally Posted by Techie

Hi Eugene

That is such a shame.

Then I am at a loss as to what to do next.

I really thought two years would have seen some real changes to to your software.

Do you have any time frame on the filters, as I do need to know whether to hold off and wait or seek the software elsewhere.

This statement
"It will soon be possible to filter products with a specific set of properties by addressing your Ecwid store with a specific URL, so you can develop a filter for your Ecwid shop soon."

I do not understand this, can you explain to me how your filter would work.
Is it not the same as the one i use in XCart?
Sorry I am still leaning.

Thanks

Josh

The same way you can address a listing of products in some particular category with a specific URL (you naturally perceive it as "category URL"), it will be possible to list the products having some particular property with another specific URL (so you can think of it as a link to the results of a filter by that property). This we envision as the most important part of the filters, and the user interface - the actual widgets and controls that will allow your customers to filter products without having you to write any code for that - will follow.

This functionality is currently in active development, however, I cannot provide any ETAs on it.

[theyarnco1]

HElp! Our business is growing. We REALLY need more than 1000 categories. We are sorely limited by this. Please help us.
The Yarn Company

[Eugene Rimmer]

Originally Posted by theyarnco1

HElp! Our business is growing. We REALLY need more than 1000 categories. We are sorely limited by this. Please help us.
The Yarn Company

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