Product Information

[Nfiniti99]

Hello My product information consist of the product description, product sizes, product color and price. This information is in an excel spreadsheet. I'm new to this software and was wondering how I could go about using the spreadsheet to incorporate the product information on the page. Or would it be better to transfer the information into an Access database and use that. I've been adding the product information one by one, but my store will have over 300 products and I was hoping that I wouldn't have to individually input this information for each product. This information will appear on the More Information Pages.

[Winterfellow]

I use Open Office Calc and just did this recently with our 700 products, but I'm sure the process will be similar for Excel:

You can download the database from the ShopSite web interface after you have put in one or two products to your computer (Utilities->Database->Download or follow the link on the Products page that refers to the database) and open the file in Excel as a .csv file (you will have to set the delimiter to be 'tab' and not 'comma' perhaps). The sheet you will be looking is clearly laid out, and from there it should be a simple process of copying and pasting your existing columns.

You can also use the column 'Product on Pages' within the spreadsheet to assign your products to the Shopsite pages, provided you enter the exact ShopSite page name, for instance if you have created a page in ShopSite called Apparel and then put that in the Product on Pages column for a given product, then when you Upload your new database that product will appear on one of the Apparel pages.

Of course, make sure to use the Backup function within the ShopSite database page before you upload your new DB. Also, I would recommend copying the downloaded ShopSite DB so that you will have always have a good copy to refer to in case something goes wrong.

Not sure what the exact Save As options are for Excel but in Open Office Calc I chose to save the sheet as a .csv file and it was already Tab delimited because I had started with the downloaded ShopSite DB.

On the Upload page, it will ask you what the field seperator is and in this case it would be Tab.

Once you have chosen the file to Upload, ShopSite will work for a moment and then tell you that (hopefully) that all of the fields are matched, which tells you that you are good to go.

You could use FTP to put the new DB on your server directly, but I would recommend doing it via ShopSite so that you have the functionality of the field checking so that you know you aren't going to get a messed up product DB.

Hope this helps.

[Jim]

You might also want to read these 2 kbase articles about issues when using Excel to create your upload files.

http://support.shopsite.com/kbase/view_ ... nID=S02720

http://support.shopsite.com/kbase/view_ ... nID=S04190

Also you do not need to use all of the columns of data in your upload file. You can use just those that relate to your store and other column values will be set to the default values.

[Nfiniti99]

Thank you both for your replies. It is greatly appreciated and will help tremendously.