Computer Hardware eCommerce - help.

HI Folks,

I hope someone here can help me. I am looking at a computer hardware ecommerce site.

I have some questions about the practicalities of maintaining such a site.

1. Some of my competitors have sites that have tabluated details for each item on the site, and there would be at least 10,000 items on the site.

How do they get and format such detailed information about all these items?

The csv files that are supplied nightly from the suppliers to contain a description, but it is nowhere near as detailed as what some of the competitors are listing.

2. All the competitors photos are with the same background and nicely formatted.

I get the impression that they are ripping it from somewhere, but where?

The site I am refering to is www.c1com.co.nz

If someone could enlighten me I would be very grateful.

Thanks,

-Al

Well they don't all seem to have that detailed a description, this one for example, but as to how they store and format, they would be stored in the database along with the product IDs themselves.

I'm guessing the images either come from the manufacturer or they take them, themselves. The images shown are hosted right on their own site, so it's a fair bet they either came from the manufacturer, or were taken by this retailer.

Detailed or not, with over 3000 products, I cant imagine they manually key in the specs?

A lot of sites just have :

Descritpion: Intel TM8400 1033FSB LGA775 Core 2 Duo

But they have it in seperate fields of a table like:

Manufacturer: Intel
Chip Model : TM8400
Socket: LGA775
Cores: 2

etc

and they have it formatted that same way for every processor!