Stop adding duplicate products

  • As an Amazon affiliate I’ve started filling my site with hundreds of different products. I can’t sit there until I complete the site or I’d be there the rest of my life.

    Is it possible to to automatically keep track of the products already on the site so when I go back and continue to add products I don’t accidently duplicate a product that I’ve already added.

    Is there a plugin or piece of code I can add that prevents me from doing this. Its not only disheartening for me, but off putting for my customers to find two products exactly the same on one site.

    Thanks a lot for your help.

Viewing 3 replies - 1 through 3 (of 3 total)
  • Moderator bcworkz

    (@bcworkz)

    Well, in a sense the DB keeps track of all products added. Getting it to tell you what you need to know can be a challenge. It’s possible to check for exact duplicates. A variation in the assigned title could result in the same product occurring twice because it’s not an exact match. Is there any field that unequivocally indicates replication? A SKU or product ID or the like? More generally, how can we know when a duplicate is being added? What can we use for reliable comparison?

    A hook in the save product process could search for a match and kill the process when found. That would mean needlessly entering product data though. There is a process that runs to ensure the assigned slug does not exist, adding a sequence number if it exists. This could catch duplicates before much time is spent entering data. It’s harder to implement though. I don’t think there’s a handy hook. You’d need to add another callback to the Ajax request to do the search. I don’t know how a match would be communicated back.

    Probably better is to do your own Ajax as soon as the field used to determine a match has data. Then your script can put up an alert box or something. Sorry for rambling solutions, thinking out loud as I type. I’m unaware of any plugins for this, but that does not mean there are none.

    Thread Starter centturian

    (@centturian)

    Firstly
    Thank you bcworkz for an expanded reply to my question. I think the answer lies in the DB. If I can find something to watch the database and alert me wDUPLICATION ALERT when I get two products with the same description. But what.

    Perhaps the way to go is find a Coder and get him to knock up a bit of code for such an occasion.

    Anyway thanks very much for stopping by and replying.

    Moderator bcworkz

    (@bcworkz)

    You’re welcome. Getting a pro to work up something for you is always a good option. Just in case you need a couple ideas for where to find competent coders who know WP, you can try jobs.wordpress.net or jetpack.pro.

Viewing 3 replies - 1 through 3 (of 3 total)
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