Importing Products Into Sellr

By Angus  |  5 Feb 2015 10:00:00

When I speak with merchants who are interested in opening a new website with Sellr, one of the biggest concerns that I regularly hear regards the perceived level of time and effort involved in re-listing their products on our platform.

Some businesses have spent such a long time adding products to their existing website that owners I’ve spoken to feel that they are essentially tied in, unable to feasibly dedicate the time to do it all again.

This is a very understandable concern and something we have attempted to offset with our product import option. The aim of this post is highlight this functionality to any merchants who are not aware of it and to go into the detail how you can save a huge amount of time by taking advantage of it.

I am going to start with the quickest and most simplistic method of doing this which is perfectly adequate for fairly standard products. I will then go into product options and some of the more complex functionality that our system accommodates.

1.

Migrating from another platform?

If you are migrating from another system, begin by exporting your product data from your existing platform in a CSV format and open it with Excel. If you are starting from scratch then begin from step 2.

2.

Setting up your spreadsheet

Open Excel and in a row enter the titles below. Because different platforms sometimes use different terminology for the same thing, at the risk of stating the obvious, I will put a brief explanation next to the titles so that you are able to quickly match your data with the fields Sellr recognises.

supercategoryname = Main category name, e.g. Shirts. (Note that this is a generic description of the category and does not actually contain items).
 

categoryname = Sub category name, e.g. Quicksilver Shirt (Assigns this item to its relevant page). 
 

itemname = Item name is what the customer is going to see on the website, checkout and on invoices /documents.

itemcode = This is any code you wish to assign to the item for stock keeping purposes.
 

price  =  Do not include currency symbols.
 

costprice = Enter if you wish to use the Sellr accountancy software

weight = A nominal value if using weight based shipping, (e.g. if weight is between 1 – 5 shipping = £5.99) 

stock = Enter if you wish to use stock control. If left empty Sellr assumes that you have 1 item in stock.

These are the most commonly used product fields however a full list of valid fields can be found on the “Import” page itself.

Please note that with Yes/No fields, 1 = Yes and 0 = No. If you do not enter anything is this field then Sellr will assume a default answer of no.

3.

Products with variations

For products with variations (known by Sellr as “modifiers”), put another heading on the field title row named “modifiers” and then next to the relevant item follow the format below. The example given is for a product that is available for no added cost in both red and blue.

Correct format = [groupname:{value#price#weight}]         

E.g.                       [colour:{red#0#0}{blue#0#0}]       

Leave as {} for unrestricted, for example if an item is available with customisable text on it you would put…  [text:{}] 

Product Groups are similar to modifiers but they are more advanced and flexible. Whereas “modifiers” allow a customer to modify a single item, product groups are more useful when each variant of a product is a different stock keeping unit (SKU).

When setting these up, put another heading on the field title row named “group” then next to the relevant item follow the format below.

groupcode#groupname:{variationname#variationtype#variationvalue}{variationname#variationtype#variationvalue}

“Variation type” refers to whether you want the options to appear in a drop down menu (D) or as radio buttons (R).

So for example, a bunch of flowers available with 2 types of flower and in 2 different sizes would look like…

BOF#Bunch Of Flowers:{size#D#regular}{flower#D#daisy}

BOF#Bunch Of Flowers:{size#D#large}{flower#D#daisy}

BOF#Bunch Of Flowers:{size#D#regular}{flower#D#tulip }

BOF#Bunch Of Flowers:{size#D#large}{flower#D#tulip}

4.

Importing into Sellr

Once you have made sure that your product data follows this format, you will now be able to start importing your items in batches of 50 at a time.

To do this you will need to save your spreadsheet as either a Tab Delimited Text File or as a CSV (Comma Separated Values) File. Once you have done this, click on the “Import” link above the Sellr item manager, copy and paste up to 50 lines of data in the designated box and click “Import”.

This is without doubt the quickest way for those with large product databases to easily get the basics of their website set up. You will still need to assign images and descriptions to your products, however assuming these are all saved on your PC already then this is simply a matter of copy / pasting text and uploading images.