Product export / import?

[S88MRG]

Dear all,

I am not very experienced with importing / exporting product lists and using xml / csv and need some help!

I need to gather all my data into one spreadsheet, ready to import to my eshop. The problem is that I have no idea what data I need!

If I create an excell file with model number, price, brand, short description, long description etc will it be easy for someone with technical knowledge to easyily convert this to a csv or xml file for importing?

I will be getting a company to provide me with support / design my new website, however I want to get cracking on getting all my product data ready, but don't want to spend hours inputting data, for it to be useless in the long term?

I hope this makes sense, and any advise would be greatly appreciated.

Mike

 

[dataferret]

What e-commerce application will you be using to power the store?

What products are you selling? Do you have the product images? Do you know what categories and attributes they will need?

There is a lot more to think about than simply whacking stuff into a spreadsheet.

If you want data entry services I can help with this because I have a team who convert product catalogues into e-commerce ready spreadsheets for a fee of course.

We can also provide image feed services too - for a fee of course.

 

[Vision2]

without knowing the system would be hard to say, as some have the ability to import a great deal of data thats useful for both customer point of view as well as from a SEO / structure point of view.

but in essence, majority would be:

| id | product name | category | sub category | meta title (if different from product name) | url (usually product name, or modified a bit to suit better from SEO point of view, see below) | Meta Description | Keywords | Description | Short Description | image | image 2 | image 3 | etc etc etc....

URL: (this would be the product name, some system will automatically do this, whilst others require it manually. In essence a product name of "24 Foot Bed With Amazing Something" would turn into "24-foot-bed-with-amazing-something", any spaces replaced with a '-' and no !"£$%^&*()_+#'@~,. symbols etc. )

All will have slightly different less/more requirements, work on your content, seo, product names, source quality images or get them professionally taken.

For an ecommerce site, i deploy Magento sites for my clients, very very good system.

But you will need to talk to whoever is doing your site for requirements of the data.

 

[bluedreamer]

@S88MRG

Look for an export option in your shopping cart admin. If it's there do an export of all your existing product data, open it up in Excel and you should have all the columns and data formats you need. You can use this as a template for adding your new data.

If you don't have any existing products in your cart then create some dummy ones, making sure you apply some data for every bit of product information you can. Then do the export.

 

[ssk168]

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[jackysales2]

it is not hard to do that

 

[S88MRG]

Thanks for the quick replies.

I am currently using 1and1 eshop solution, however we are going to go with Venda, and outsource the design etc to another company. The products we sell are mostly white goods, domestic appliances such as washing machines, fridges, freezers etc, but also sell brown goods such as tvs and radios.

Roughly speaking what sort of prices are we looking at in terms data entry?

And if I was to do this myself, or at least start doing it myself, is there a set rule to follow when inputting my data with Venda?

Thanks again,

Mike

 

[Vision2]

usually depends on the amount of products, and assuming all can be dumped in.

else, hire some people on a hourly rate to manually input it in.

but it boils down to the amount of products you have, if it's thousands then it's worth while talking to who ever you are getting to deploy your site to see what they can / cannot get in and what prep work is needed on the data - as well as any missing/potentially bad area's of the data you are supplying.

Most will do X per product, or X per hundred / thousand etc.

another how long is a piece of string question