Hey everyone, we’ve developed a system that handles image storage and management, and one of our clients wants an integration with VTEX. The specific use case is during product creation/update in the VTEX store — having a button or something similar that fetches all images for that product from our software using our REST API. The import will only use the image URL from our system, since the images will remain hosted there.
What’s the best strategy for building this integration? I’ve seen there are options like developing an app, creating React components, using the API directly somehow… but I’d love to hear your advice.
Good afternoon @thiago.sz, how’s it going?
We developed our own image integration app here at the company using Python.
Roughly speaking, we used basic hosting for the images — something like Hostgator — to upload the images automatically with our app via FTP, which generates the image URL that is then used to upload to VTEX.
Basically, we used Python and VTEX’s APIs, which you can check out at this link: Images APIs
If there’s anything else I can help with, just let me know.
Cheers!
I didn’t quite understand your question. But, considering that in VTEX, you first register the product data, then the SKU data, and then add images, pricing, inventory, etc., the image upload should be part of the SKU creation flow.
In an ideal scenario, all information related to the product catalog, orders, and customers should be stored and centralized in an ERP, which should be responsible for inserting and updating data in VTEX as needed (new products, SKUs, images, inventory, prices, invoiced orders, etc.).
Likewise, it’s also necessary to configure an “Order Hook” on the VTEX side to notify your ERP about orders that are created, paid, canceled, etc. — since VTEX only keeps orders from the last two years on record.
Out of curiosity, why are you handling the image integration separately from the rest of the integration instead of treating it as part of the same flow?
@andremiani I don’t know if it’s the case for @thiago.sz but here at our company, we had to handle it separately, because the ERP integration we use, let’s just say it’s a bit sketchy — to put it nicely — and it wasn’t capable of creating the image integration alongside the product and SKU creation flow; so we took it upon ourselves internally to build our own app for image uploading and it runs like a charm!
Our system is a software dedicated to storing and organizing images — in this case, product photos and other files. So the client wants to keep all images in our dedicated system, which is better suited for saving, organizing, and searching for specific images. On VTEX, only the product photo URLs are stored, pointing to the image URLs in our system, which can also automatically resize and compress images.
So it’s VTEX for store management, and our system for image storage and delivery.
The client first uploads all the photos to our system, which processes them and generates the correct versions, including the SKU or reference. Then, when adding a product in VTEX, they just need to enter the SKU or reference in some way, and the plugin will fetch all the photos for that product from our system, keeping those images on our server/CDN.
When those photos are updated in our system — such as a new version of an image — it’s automatically updated in the store as well.
