Creating Product Custom Attributes and How to Map Them to eBay Item Specifics

What's this Guide For?

As we all know, when creating listings, eBay categories and item specifics can be a bit tedious. In this guide, we cover a way of speeding this process up whilst also setting up your products in such a way that, should you need to create listings in the future, the specific information is there.

What are Custom Attributes?

Custom attributes allow you to store information against a product in StoreFeeder that is outside of general information like weight, brand, manufacturer.

An example could be that you sell coffee beans and you want the flavour profile to be accessible when viewing the information for this product; in this case, you could create a custom attribute in StoreFeeder called "Flavour Profile" and use this to create a new data field against each of your coffee bean products that shows us what the flavour profile is.

The way that this would help when creating eBay listings is that StoreFeeder can check the custom attributes on a product when setting up item specifics, meaning that you can pull the information without leaving the page.

How to Create Custom Attributes

In order to create a custom attribute, you first need to edit the product you want to create it for. When you do, you should see a navigation bar on the left-hand side of the page, click 'Additional Information'.

Once on the additional information tab, scroll down to the bottom of the page to find a section for product attributes. If you click the '+ New Custom Attribute' button in the top right corner of the section, the following should pop up:

Here, you can enter the name for your custom attribute; all you need to do after that is click the '+ Add Custom Attribute' button and, that's all there is to it, you'll have created a custom attribute.

How to Add Custom Attribute Values to your Products

Now that you've created your custom attribute, you probably want to add them to your products. There are two ways you can do this:

Individually

In the same place that you would create a custom attribute ('Additional Information' tab on the 'Edit Product' page), you can also assign attributes and their values to the product you've selected.

From here it's as simple as selecting the desired custom attribute from the aptly titled dropdown box and then typing a value for it (as shown above).

If you only need to change the custom attributes on a single product, this is the quickest way to do so. If you're wanting to edit custom attribute values across multiple products, you'll be wanting the next method of editing custom attributes.

Don't forget to hit the 'Save' button at the bottom of the page after you're done!

Bulk Edit

Bulk editing custom attributes on your products is done in exactly the same way as you would edit most other fields in bulk - through the import/export feature.

If you are unfamiliar with using this feature, a guide can be found for it here: https://support.storefeeder.com/hc/en-gb/articles/360007791738--How-to-use-the-Product-Import-Export-Feature

Something not mentioned on that guide is that the tokens to export for editing custom attributes are located just below the 'Standard Fields' tokens as shown on the image below:

Importing the changes is exactly the same as shown in the product import/export guide.

Mapping Custom Attributes to eBay Item Specifics

When creating eBay listings, you can use your custom attributes to help set up item specifics quicker.

When setting your item specifics for your eBay listing, you can choose your custom attribute as one of the fields to match on the product the listing is for as shown below:

As you can see, by selecting the custom attribute we created (1), it has pulled the value from the product and assigned it to this item specific value field (2).

That's all there is to it!