I'm having a logic issue and I actually don't know how to overcome it. I'm faced with several product feeds that have various fields inside and not standardized in all the datafeeds: upc, mpn, brand name, title, description. Currently I'm mapping the products by upc as that's unique and quite easy. The issue comes that only to few of the products have this field so I'm thinking of another combination for mapping of brand name and mpn. I use this to avoid having mapped by mpn from different brands, actually different products. Now the hard part comes: A product, a pair of shoes for example has: same mpn and brand even if it has different colors. In these cases I don't usually have upc so I have to rely on mpn and brand name. Color is not a field so I can't use it to further filter. All I have is the pictures to know the color.
Products would look like:
Merchant1,Product1,MPN1,Brand1 ( green ) Merchant1,Product2,MPN1,Brand1 ( red ) Merchant2,Product3,MPN1,Brand1 ( green ) Merchant2,Product4,MPN1,Brand1 ( red )
I know I can deny mapping in the same merchant so I can avoid mixing green and red from the same merchant, but what can I do to match green from merchant 1 to green from merchant 2. The text field to say green or red is not present, that is what I see in the pictures only.
I'm not sure how to find a logic in all this so I can map accordingly.
When you have 2 products like Merchant1,Product1,MPN1,Brand1 ( green ) Merchant1,Product2,MPN1,Brand1 ( red ) do you know the image file name ?? because if you know you could read this file name concatenate all the info like Merchant1,Product1,MPN1,Brand1+imageFileName and then use md5 function to generate a code ... that you store along with every product ... this way when you have to store a new one you can check if you already have that md5 code in to your database