Excel Guru's required - Live CSV for Stocklist of a website.

[DejaVu]

A mate of mine is setting up a dropshipping website and has asked me to look into creating something that will help keep his stocklist upto date with his suppliers.
Not ever done it this way before and I'm not even sure its possible (but I'm a strong believer of anything is possible), so thought I'd ask the you lads here on DF.

This is what needs to happen (sort of).

Live CSV with Stock/Cost Price/Product Name @ http://myuser:mypass@mysupplier.com/stuff.csv

-----> ----->

Conversion Occurs (Live CSV on SkyDrive or Google Drive Perhaps)

-----> ----->

Required format for his sites Import CSV.

I was thinking 3 Sheets in a live Spreadsheet, the first being imported from the Live CSV (will this change as the Suppliers stock changes though?).
Conversion would be quite simple using the likes of =Sheet1!A2 in the appropriate place to correspond with what's need in the sites backend import.
Sheet 3 would then be the CSV required by his Live rebranded site.

Am I completely off-track, in dreamland and with no idea about how this'll work?
Quite possibly... but does anyone care to point out what and why it won't work and if a better solution is possible?

Still waiting for the Live list from suppliers to find out, but thought you guys might know before I tried to bother.

[akimba]

I am an Excel Guru but I don't understand what you are trying to do :-(

I am guessing you get the live stock from supplier and you want to clean/convert it to be imported into website.

This can be done but it will take manual intervention i.e. click button in excel to start the conversion.

What about new products and does he need validation or is the web import process robust, I am guessing it has id's for products so cant just load them in any old order?

[DejaVu]

you get the live stock from supplier and you want to clean/convert it to be imported into website.

Spot on.

What about new products and does he need validation or is the web import process robust, I am guessing it has id's for products so cant just load them in any old order?

Each product has it's own 6-8 digit ID is all I know so far (still waiting for the Live List from Supplier).
New products will be added manually to his site, but updated by the Live CSV for Stock and Cost Price.
The site was created by VisualSoft and they assure us it's a robust import - they're just a bit shit with communicating any worthwhile information with us.

The suppliers CSV is going to be completely different to the one required for import, we are just hoping to simplify the process, instead of having to import a CSV everyday to keep it up to date.
Being over 3,000 products is going to be a PiTA to do everyday.

[Over Carl]

I would forget this idea and instead look into a back end database.

It's been a very long time since I did this so I forget the details but access, adodb and asp spring to mind.

[blacksheep]

As with over carol you need something with state control and spreadsheets aren't going to cut it with,ultiple users - relational database is the way to go.

[Zoots]

over carol

snigger

[blacksheep]

Name used at weekends

[akimba]

If the Stock files from all suppliers are in the exact same format get an import routine created to import these.

Updating the stock maybe a mundane thing to do but depending on volume sometime mundane things pay, if I was making x thousands a day I wouldn't mind importing a few files a day for that.