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Page 4 of 5 Setting Up Products
For your Product spreadsheet, you need the following Column Headings:
CAT_CODE - The final category code from the previous spreadsheet
CODE - The Product's Unique SKU or Code
NAME - The name that is displayed
THUMBNAIL - The path to the thumbnail image for your product
IMAGE - The full sized image
PRICE - The selling price
COST - The cost of the product (useful when offering distributor pricing, XX% over cost)
DESC - The product's description
WEIGHT - The unit weight. Needed to calculate anything but flat rate shipping
TAXABLE - Is this item taxable? Value = TRUE/FALSE
ACTIVE - Is this product currently live? Value = TRUE/FALSE
HEADER - Can give a product a unique header
FOOTER - As well as footer
The same rules apply to products, when it comes to building naming conventions and descriptions and headers. Use formulas combined with HTML templates to automate the process as much as possible. It is also useful when naming images to use the product code as a root in your image name: prodcode.jpg, prodcode_th.jpg, etc. This way you can do more with your pages. This will be covered in the future.
You should now have a full spreadsheet for your CategorySubcategories and one for your Products. {mospagebreak title=Working With Spreadsheets}Working With SpreadsheetsIf you are using StoreMan, then you need to copy the cells of standard Merchant tables, then Paste > Special > Values into a new worksheet. StoreMan will fail the import process if there are columns besides the standard ones. If you just cut the other columns out, you will lose all the data you merged. This applies to both the Category and Product files.
If you are using OUI and you are going to import text files direct in Merchant, remember you need to create the Categories first for your initial store set-up.
Now you need to open your copy of Text Write Program. This will allow you to write your text file with a |-pipe delimiter.
When you first open Text Write, you will be asked to enable macros. You need to enable them for this to work. I then set up my sheet like this:
Record Delimiter: Code 13,10
Stop if Record Delimiter found in cell? No
Field Delimiter Character |
Bracketing Character Character (I leave the value blank)
Bracket all fields? No
Bracket blank fields also? Yes
Skip blank rows? No
Write entire sheet? No
If no, Expand selection? No
If no, write rectangular? Yes
The file name can be something like STORECATS.txt for categories.
Then you open your Excel spreadsheet and select all the rows and columns needed. I like to work from the bottom row, col A back up and then to the right, as opposed to selecting top down and to the right from A1.
Once you have your area of the spreadsheet selected, simply press CTRL+SHIFT+W and it will write to the text file with the | delimiter in the same folder as the spreadsheet itself.
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