Help: Trouble assigning items to pages

[moviecycle]

This may seem like a simple problem, and I hope it is. I have ShopSite Manager and a relatively simple store layout. We sell used movies and games, so we have three product pages: DVD, BLURAY and GAMES. No images or subproducts or more info pages.

When I first set up the store, I was able to upload my inventory in three separate .csv files, and assign them to the appropriate pages as I went along. For example:

1. Upload dvd.csv.
2. Assign items. Here I would select all items and assign them to the DVD page.
3. Upload bluray.csv
4. Assign items. Here, the items that I just uploaded were preselected by the software and I could simply assign them to the BLURAY page.
5. Upload games.csv.
6. Assign items. Again, only the game items were highlighted for me and I could assign them to the GAMES page.

That was a couple weeks ago, and now I'm unable to do that. I went to update my inventory (we have a brick-and-mortar store as well, so the inventory changes daily) and ran into this snag.

When I upload the first file, everything is normal, but when I upload the second and third files, I'm unable to assign ONLY those items to the page I want. When I go to the Asssign Items screen, I would have to select manually each item I want to assign to that page. With over 5000 items, many with the same name, this is just not an acceptable option.

What I'm wondering is, have I forgotten some very important step, or has ShopSite (or my install) got a bug, or ... something else maybe?

Is there any way to put something in the .csv file to specify what page something should go to?

Any help would be appreciated. The tech support people at my web host are not making any progress so far.

[Jim]

To assign items to a page in the product upload file you would put the name of the page that the product is to be placed on in the "Product On Pages" field. Older versions of ShopSite used the "Add to Pages" field. Make sure that you do not use both of these fields in the same upload file or it can cause problems in the database.

[moviecycle]

To assign items to a page in the product upload file you would put the name of the page that the product is to be placed on in the "Product On Pages" field. Older versions of ShopSite used the "Add to Pages" field. Make sure that you do not use both of these fields in the same upload file or it can cause problems in the database.

Thank you Jim. I'm still a little baffled. I upload a file with a field for "Add to pages" (that's what my version is calling it) with the name of the page in it, but those items do not assign to the page. If I go to assign the products to the page in the Pages menu, I am faced with having to select each item. As I said above, I've got three different files I need to upload and assign to three different pages. I know I did this before, so I don't understand why I'm having so much trouble with this now.

There must be something I'm not doing correctly.

EDIT: I notice that there are errors for the items, all telling me "-- The page ""DVD"" to add this product to was not found in the pages database."

[Jim]

The page you assign the product to must be in the database or you get that type of error. Note the double quote marks around the page name, ""DVD"" . That indicates that it is looking for a page with the name "DVD" . The extra quotes around the name, which I assume should be just DVD with no quote marks around it probably came because you use Excel to create your upload file. When Excel saves date in a tab delimited format it quotes fields that have any punctuation in them. You can verify this by saving a file from Excel to tab delimited format and then opening the file in WordPad or Notepad and look for quotes around some data that did not have it in Excel. To get around this problem you should follow the steps in this Kbase solution
http://support.shopsite.com/KBase/questions/1978

[moviecycle]

...To get around this problem you should follow the steps in this Kbase solution
http://support.shopsite.com/KBase/questions/1978

Excellent! Thank you so much. This doesn't explain why I was able to do the assignments the way I did before, but this method is a LOT cleaner.

Problem solved, thank you!