Does anyone know of a good ecommerce backend for Universe/Ratex? Our
current solution creates double the work since we must input our
merchandise into Ratex first, then we have to manually enter each item
into our website. It would be helpful if there was an ecommerce package
that offered importing your items instead of hand keying them. It would
be nice if we could find this solution in an ecommerce package since we
do not want to spend the time and money to write our own. Any insight
on this subject would be appreciated.

Can you explain a little more on what you mean. Do you mean I could use
XML between Ratex and our current Ecommerce provider?

you need a translation tool

find out from your ecommerce provider what formats they accept
they'll probably do xml

What translation tool would you suggest?

by the way paul fraser is tronic

maybe BACS is available over the internet
i'm not sure if it is
I also don't know what ratex is?
you've really what to find out what kind of a system your e-commerce
provider is
providing
if they accept XML then you're flying
all you've got to is find an EDI document which suits your needs
and translate it into XML

maybe there are EDI standards designed purely for XML
but i'm sure the current EDI fits well enough anyway
it's almost XML

i'm still thinking about it
it would be clever to crank up the objects interface within universe
and adapt it to XML

I could do one for you but I'd need about six months from now
I haven't got a laser printer - I'd need the universe manuals

or i could do you one in databasic quickly
you could have it emailed to you just dump it in and run it
i'd require paying though

When you say you would write one. You mean that you would write a tool
that would provide the translation from the Universe database structure
into a xml file? If so how time consuming would that be?