Sugestions on large catalog (over 2k products)

Hi Hikashop community,

I'm about to undertake an eCommerce project with lots of products and need a suggestion about how do you think is the best way to approach this particular case and have your point of view about if sincerely hikashop is the way to go.

Now, this shop is going to sell products and parts related to the boat, yacht, and sea living.

My "tipo" product is something like this:

Main product with an unique SKU and the base price > 5 different variations of that product with an unique SKU, and sometimes a diferent image for each.

I've tried to do this (successfully) a couple of months ago with the first categories and my workflow was like this.

• First i manually created the category tree trough the control panel of hikashop, so i could grab the category ID easily for use on the subsequent CSV files i created specialy for each category, i've illustrated more or less that process in this blog post www.hikashop.com/en/forum/2-general-talk...teristics.html#40387
• Then i manually modify the variants table via phpmyadmin for mass adding all the possible variant a product could have
• At this point i created the csv with the products and variants for each one
• Then i modified the search plugin to be able to search the product code field

But sometimes i felt that this approach was not as streamlined as it could and possibly very risky considering that for mass adding lots of variants i had to go and write directly on the database, when you have around 10K unique product codes if you write a couple of numbers wrong on that table you could really mess everything out and track that error could be very dificult because you have to count only on your understanding of the situation and there's no warning if your doing something wrong with Product Codes if you're manually editing the tables.

My question is if there is a better way to do it, they're really lots of products and i don't want to find myself going mad in the day to day management of the website.

May be i'm not explaining it very good but basically my question is about what do you think is the best way to approach a project like this, i've tried then with the standart edition and i was really happy about the product, now i'm going to begin the project again from the ground up, i'm going to remake everything (this time for real) and if Hikashop is the way to go i'll begin with the business edition since the beginning, we need to have the possibility to translate the front end in at least two languages (italian-english) and by the way, we need to know how to Upload both languages of the product with the same csv.

I know is not an easy project and i'm not a too much skilled programmer that's why i'm asking you how viable is to approach this monster with hikashop, honestly i really want to do it with HS cuz' i'm really loving it but i'll understand if you suggest me to go with another solution if you suggest.

Thanks in advance for your time.