Hi.
I have a bit of a problem I need an answer for, and I am praying someone on here can help.

I have hired a developer to create my site, but I am not sure if he is up to the datasbase query part, I keep telling him what I want, but he is saying its not logical or possible. Maybe he's right, I don't know. But anyway.

The query we need set up is , that a merchant can import their products stocklist into a database on our system.

When a user wants a certain item they login and put their query in the search field, lets say for instance blue Nike shocks. Now what we need is for that query to look in the database and find all the blue nike shocks and send an email alert to all merchants selling blue nike shocks.

The developer says that this will end up sending an email to erery merchant that has anything blue, anything nike, and anything shocks in a product name and will consequently result in masses of irrelevent emails going out to merchants that don't sell blue nike shocks.

Now I am sure that searches can be tightened up to only return rellevent results and email the relevant merchants, but how would the database be set up, and more importantly how would we have to make the merchant set up a spreadsheet before importing so that everything was in the correct place for optimum relevence.

We need to keep in mind that some merchants hold inventory of thousands of stock and order in items, and so manual one by one submissions to the database is a no no...

Please, I would be sooooo grateful if some kind expert out there can give me a little guidance.

Thanks in advance.

You are right in saying that a search can be done in a way that you will only return records which contains all words entered in your search box.

I am not sure I understand what you want to achieve but sending an email to suppliers every time someone returns their products seems like a lot of emails and even if I am not sure what you want to achieve I have the feeling there might be more efficient way to achieve what ever you want to do.

For instance, I have done a job site with an email alert, as opposed to sending an email to people matching every time a job is posted we compile them in an automated way once a day and send one email in stead of ..... don't forget that people get fed up if they receive too many emails and most than likely won't open them.

Hope this is of help