Data entry requirement

[weddinginvitationuk.co.uk]

Hi Folks,

I have a small but growing site and have recently found a few very good suppliers with very large product ranges.

To get these onto my site there will be a lot of photography etc which I have in hand the one thing I need advice on is uploading products to the site which basically involves the usual - code, price, descriptions, pictures etc.

The problem it is the amount of products that I need to get on there initially (well over 10000 for the first section) and the relatively short time scale I have to do it - however it needs to be accurate as an incorrect code / picture can cause all sorts of knock on problems as I am sure many of you are aware.

I have thought about hiring someone on a temporary contract, which is something I am considering, but does anybody know of any companies that would specialise in this sort of thing?

Thanks

[sm1]

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Nicole did an absolutely great job for us, great detail, high accuracy and in a speedy time. Just to top it off, great value :)

[Whistle Ink]

Hi,

If you have 10,000 products to upload then it's going to cost you a shed load to get it done by someone else. If you do it yourself it will drive you crazy!

The first question would be does your ecommerce package allow you to import product data via csv file etc?

Second question would be does your supplier have this product information available in some kind of format, access database, excel?

[spreadsheetsdirect]

If you can upload via csv or txt then it's quite easy to set up a spreadsheet to convert your base data with any costing calcs to a format suitable to be uploaded. I've done a few similar jobs for people on this forum in the past.

[sm1]

I must also add Phil's Excel help is great too :)

[weddinginvitationuk.co.uk]

Thanks, unfortunately the suppliers are very "anti internet retailers" (surprise) even though I can prove I do good trade with other suppliers, so they do not have the products in any helpful format, even the pictures are naff which is why we are shooting them properly

It is basically up to me to put the products on there, and I can only do this one at a time, my software does have an "add similar product" feature which is useful for groups of products where just the code and picture change so this does speed this up - but with the amount I have to upload you can see my problem!

Cheers

[Whistle Ink]

Hi,

Do you have other suppliers? Why not just add a few core products from each category and then work on filling it up in chunks?

Does your supplier give you a list printed out? They must have it stored somewhere if they have 10K plus products!?! Even if it costs you something?

[edmondscommerce]

For this kind of situation where the seller expects you to copy and paste information from their web site and doesn't offer a feed or spreadsheet - it is possible to create a script to automatically scrape all of the relevant pictures and information from the suppliers web site and save it into a format that you can easily upload.

I do this kind of thing quite a lot and it will save you thousands of staff hours and be inhumanly accurate aswell!

[mysterons]

I would be asking my supplier why they cant provide me with a CSV of their stock.

It may not be in the total correct format but it can then be tweaked around. I received a CSV file from Neilsen (the book people) containing some 90,000 products that I loaded into my own local database, parsed through my own script that then generated a file containing the necessary MySQL instructions to load the products into the database - works like a dream :D