Ways to add products to the online store

Adding products to an online store is sometimes hard work – creating descriptions, filling in additional fields, setting prices, and all this takes time. Do you know how to shorten the time needed to enter products on the webstore?

Expanding the offer of an online store can be carried out in several ways:

• manual adding of products based on the physical commodities of the company,
• manual adding of products on the basis of the manufacturer’s website or price list,
• importing products to the store on the basis of csv, xls, xml files.

Importing products to the online store

If it is important for you to quickly add products to the online store, it is important to consider importing products.
In an online store, where a small range of goods is available, manual adding of products is certainly a great solution, but if we have a high turnover and a diverse offer, e.g. in an online bookstore, it is hard to base the functioning of website on daily "pasting" of new products into database. In case of large quantities of products, it is worth equipping the store with a module for importing csv, xls or xml files. This type of file for import to the online store can be prepared by you, commissioned to prepare the file to an external company or received from the supplier or manufacturer.

Importing products and different types of files

If you receive goods from many suppliers, it is difficult to obtain a homogeneous type of files to import products to the online store, so usually modifications are necessary to import the data into correct fields. It also happens that the manufacturer or supplier provides ready-made files for import, but they are in a different format than foreseen by our module, e.g. we can import a file in csv format without time-consuming modifications, but we get xml file – what then? What remains is to manually add products to the store or order to prepare a script to process import files. You are probably wondering what such a script does? It looks like this: fields available in xml file are assigned to fields available in our csv (or xls) import file, after importing xml file into the program e.g. through a link (depending on how we order it to the programmer), the script processes xml file given to it and in response creates a new csv file ready for import to the online store.

Import of products to the store – how to turn disadvantages into advantages

An unquestionable advantage of importing products on the basis of the manufacturer’s price list is quick loading of the online store, it is practically possible to set prices and sell them – assuming, of course, that we receive photos of products in the package, which we also import or finally link to given products manually. However, this system also has drawbacks, which appear during the positioning of the store, namely – duplication of content. Duplication of content is unfavorable, because the google search engine for a given query does not display the same content twice, and at the same time it knows which of them has been indexed first and which one has been duplicated. However, this is not a reason to resign from this method for adding products to the online store; you have to convert it to your advantage. From the import of products you can initially fill in additional fields (technical specification), and descriptions from the manufacturer can be used as product descriptions for comparison engines – in this way we do not give for free our unique descriptions to the website, which usually will always be in the search engine higher than our e-store. Imported data can also be used as a database to build unique product descriptions; certainly it is a great convenience for the copywriter, who no longer has to waste time searching for information about the product.

But what with product photos?

Product in the online store is not only a description and attributes of additional fields, it is also photos that catch the customer’s eye, that is why it is so important that photos of products are of good quality, attract the attention of recipient and say "buy me" – not literally, but they should evoke positive emotions, which translate into the need to own an item. Product descriptions are usually of secondary importance to the customer, but they are very important for the site’s indexing robots, as keywords are placed in the descriptions, thanks to which the online store pops up in the search engine after typing a specific phrase. Product photos are also important for the positioning of organic store, because they appear in google graphics, so it is important that the image names contain the product name, for this reason it is worth filling in ALT (alternative text) images and title (auxiliary text), which appears as a balloon after pointing cursor over the image. If you receive a package of photos from the manufacturer or vendor, it is a good idea to rename the files to match product names and provide them with ALT and title mentioned above.

Go to offer