Loading your e-commerce master data

Loading your e-commerce master data can seem daunting when you have hundreds of products to load!

To help you maintain your shop yourself, we provide:-

• one to one training
• video tutorials
• help sheets

It is important that you practice entering your product master data. Entering a huge number of products can seem an endless task however, and so we provide as an optional extra a data load service for your products and their images.  This can save you many days work and is very cost-effective.

The Squirrelhouse Data Load Plan

• First organise your shop's products into categories, being careful to identify keywords that your potential customers will use to search for your products. This is a paper and pencil exercise primarily and we help you along the way with our Search Engine Optimisation guide (in the Squirrelhouse Training Zone) and advice on how best to proceed.
• We train you how to load your product categories and products and how to load your photo images. This is also backed by guides in the Squirrelhouse Training Zone). Squirrelhouse's professional photographer is highly experienced with catalogues and marketing should you need someone to do this for you.
• You manually enter your categories into your e-commerce website system and then arrange them into a hierarchy.
  
  Optionally - if you want us to help load your product data:-
  
  • We give you access to an online spreadsheet (see example below) where you can enter details of your products and if you have lots of similar products with only colour, size etc differences, you only need to enter the product's SKU (its Stock Keeping Unit or unique product code) and the variant information (eg. green or size 12).
  • You collect your product images and ensure that each product image has a filename with the same name as the SKU eg. AB1289.jpg   The images should ideally be provided on a CD or DVD and you will find it easier to manage if you limit your image size to no larger than 600 pixels on the longest side, whether height or width.
    

The online data load spreadsheet

This allows you to enter data in tabular form and when you're happy you have everything ready, you pass it to us to load. Where you have many products which only differ in colour, this can save you hours and hours of time because we do the work to first duplicate and splice in your variant information (which we do by hand) and then batch load the data using our Squirrelhouse Data Loader program.

You don't have to do the whole shop in one go, you can load product data in stages, with each stage having a separate spreadsheet.

However, please note that each data load is a one-off process.  And so in general, if you find that you had errors in the data load spreadsheet then they will have to be fixed manually.

An example spreadsheet is shown below (click on the image to see a larger version in printable PDF format)...

Checking your master data

Once the data has been loaded you can check it by browsing your shop pages. This isn't always the best way of identifying data you have missed however so we provide you with a master data report which allows you to see your master data in a tabular format, similar to the data load spreadsheet.

An example of one category's products is shown below (click on the image to zoom in)...