Creating Products
This page will help you get your products on StoreFeeder
A listing is different to a product - a product is a representation of the item you are selling where as a listing is the page which you are selling it on. For more information about creating listings, see this page here.
Before Creating a Product
It's highly recommended that you integrate your sales channels with StoreFeeder prior to creating products. This is simply because you may find it easier to import products from listings you have on your sales channels currently - see 'Creating Products From Listings' below.
For guides on how to integrate each of your sales channels with StoreFeeder, please see here.
Creating a Product
Now your sales channels are integrated with StoreFeeder, you will need to decide how you are going to create your product data in StoreFeeder. You can either download listings from a sales channel and create the products from there or you can import a spreadsheet and create the products from that data set.
Note: When deciding where to create your products from, you will want to take into account where you have the most complete/comprehensive data. If you have your best data on eBay for example, you would want to create your listings from your eBay channel. If your best data is on a product database and you are able to export it as a CSV or XLS file, then you way want to consider using that to create your products.
Creating Products From Listings
First you will need to turn on the Automatic listing download option found on the ‘Edit/View Integration’ page for your chosen sales channel.
To do this go to Settings > Integration Manager > Edit/View integration > Channel Detail. Once here scroll to the bottom of the page and you will see a ‘Stock Management’ section. Turn on the ‘Automatic Listing Download’, as shown below:
Press the ‘Download Listings Now’ button to trigger the listing import.
Once your listings have downloaded, you can create your products from these listings.
Creating Products from a spreadsheet import
Creating products in this manner is more labour intensive than creating products from listings and you will also need to create the products in the same format as you have your listings in on channel.
If your best product data is in a spreadsheet, then you will first need to format the file to match StoreFeeder’s product format. If you want to enter product data this way, head to the 'Import/Export Product' page which can be found from the dashboard as demonstrated on the picture below:
In order for a product to be created, you will need SKU, Name, Price and Warehouse as the bare minimum. You can find your warehouse name in StoreFeeder under Settings>Warehouse Management>Warehouses. You may want to consider creating your products with basic information to begin with and then adding additional data to the products later on.
The toolset found here makes it possible to add and extract product data using .xls files, allowing you to either create products or export products from your inventory in order to make bulk changes.
Initially you will be brought to the Export Page which allows the export of products from StoreFeeder as an .xls file OR to choose the template for importing. The import template is exported with the fields that you choose from the dropdown 'Fields to Export', then simply click download template.
Though you can choose as many options as you like (and we'd recommend filling as many of them as possible!) The bare minimum you'll need to create a product, as mentioned above is:
- SKU - Product code created and assigned to the item by you.
- Name - Name of the product.
- Price - Retail price of the product
- Warehouse - Which Warehouse the product is found in. Must match with a warehouse set up on StoreFeeder.
Selecting just these options and clicking 'Download Blank Template' should produce a template like the one shown below:
Fill this in with as many products as you want, for my example below I have created a single product "HDMI Cable".
Now we are ready to import the product to StoreFeeder so will need to save the file.
Make sure that the file type is .xls when saving.
Now head back over to StoreFeeder's 'Import/Export Products' tab, and look to the navigation bar on the left where you will find 'Import (Create New)', click on that.
Using the 'Select File...' button, find the file created a moment ago using the StoreFeeder template. Your page should look something like this:
As you can see, the 'Spreadsheet Field -> StoreFeeder Field' has automatically mapped each field for you. If for some reason, the mapping is not correct, you can do it manually by using the drop down fields.
WARNING -Be careful with the 'Create New Items' switch. Though it my seem like this is referring to the new products you are about to import it is not. Switching that bock from 'No' to 'Yes' would allow the creation of new fields within StoreFeeder. To avoid duplicating items and fields, it's best to leave this on 'No' for the most part.
After checking that all the information is correct, click the 'Import' button at the bottom of the page.
Congratulations! You've created a product on StoreFeeder.
Comments
0 comments
Please sign in to leave a comment.