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Clarity eCommerce Bulk Product Import

SEE EXAMPLES OF THE WAYS YOU CAN BULK IMPORT YOUR PRODUCTS

 

Video Transcription:

Hi. Ron from Clarity. I want to walk you through importing products, so the first thing I wanted to show you on the Clarity eCommerce platform is how I set up my demo site. So if I come in here just to show you, I'm only going to cover one product, but you can see here that the entire product catalog is all set up. I've got, I don't know, a hundred and some odd products totally set up.

If I go into this Acer laptop, you can see that it's got all the products that I can zoom in on. It's got my picture gallery and all my thumbnails. It's got my price, my sell price, it's got my stock counts, short description. This is my long description, which includes nice pictures. It's got other attributes, it's got other products that I can upsell to. It's got other tabs, so it's got my bulleted specs and right notes.

I've actually got a video. All of this was imported via a spreadsheet. It allows me every time the developers throughout a new version of the code, I can literally import my spreadsheet, and it automatically sets up all my products. Now the import ... let me scroll down a little bit here. You can also see in my URL here, this product, Acer Aspire Gaming Laptop V3 720 G980 16 gigabytes, one terabyte. I created that URL. So this is the SEO-friendly URL that was also imported. So basically what that means ... Now I'm gonna move this out of the way.

Basically what that means is I can create, and here's my import spreadsheet that I use to set up that Acer laptop. So alphabetically, that's the first product in the spreadsheet, and we're going to cover it at length. That means that I could break up and have multiple spreadsheets.

One spreadsheet could be important in setting up the products. One spreadsheet could be by the inventory management people tracking stock quantities and price changes. One could be for marketing to do the descriptions, the graphics, the SEO-friendly URL, and meta tags. So it just kind of depends on what you want to do. But the product import spreadsheet capability is to both create new and updated products.

So let's go ahead and start with my spreadsheet. And if I scroll down here, you can see it's just alphabetically, and I've got, I don't know, 145 products or something like that in here. And you can basically see columns D and E as I scroll up and down. You can see this is where ... Well, it's actually D, E, and F. This is where the products actually get assigned to the appropriate category. So you'll see those all change. So let's just start.

To be really clear, the only fields that are absolutely required would be the product name. And in our case, I call it the custom key, but that's the product skew. Those are the only two fields you wanted to import a product. Now, if I imported that product, would it show up? No, it would be in the admin interface, but it's not going to show up on the catalog because it doesn't have a URL so when I click on it, it's going to display.

Also, I haven't set it to active or visible in the catalog, so there's no reason why it would show up in the catalog. And then if I wanted to try to find it in the navigation, if I hadn't assigned it to a category, then it would be difficult to find. So even though these other fields are not necessarily required, I kind of feel like they are, or your products aren't going to show up in the product catalog.

So let's just kind of walk across these. So product name, it's going to be an active product. I want it visible. Categories, as long as you ... And you can create as many columns as you want, as long as you call them all categories. This is the parent/subcategory. So in this case I want to be in the electronics parent category and the Electronics Computer Subcategory, right? So when I actually did the import that went and created automatically the electronics parent and then the Electronics Computer subcategory.

So I could click, "See all." And it would show up there, and it would also show up underneath just the computer subcategory, because those are the two ways I wanted it to show up. Here's the custom key, that's the one unique identifier for that product. Now, one of the things that I was careful doing, um, I kept having problems with this field. This field is ... these four products down here.

So if you can see these skew numbers down here, these are those skew numbers that are in that spreadsheet. So when I go back to the spreadsheet, it skew, comma, skew, comma, skew, comma, skew. It's just the delimited. Now, the thing that kept happening when I was typing these numbers and commas, it kept converting those to numbers and then would say something like 4.3 plus whatever to the 18th power, because I didn't change this whole column and format the cells. And I had to do this numerous times on different things to text.

Once I changed the whole cell, the text, then it didn't treat it as a number. It didn't treat it as a currency, it didn't mess it up. Now, one of the other things that I could have done if I was smart when I went to type this in, I could have come up here, and I could have just started with an opening single quote and that will by default automatically make that a text field by just including that single quote.

And by definition, our parser will parse those out when it imports the files. So, if you want to be safe, you could do that. But it kind of depends on where these fields live. If we're importing from your CRM or if we're importing the products and quantities from the CRM, but the pricing and description are from a spreadsheet, and then the marketing team has to do all the SEO stuff in another spreadsheet, right?

You just kind of have to know what spreadsheets are required. This is the type of product ... Now, basically what that means is, if it is a variant master ... So you can see that I have an Amazon Echo as a master product and that I'm selling black, gray, red, dark, and light versions of that product as variants with different prices. So if I scroll over here and look at the prices you can see some are $99 on sale for $84 some are $109 on sale for $95. They're different prices so you can have different variants.

The way I would have to set that up is under the type column, call it, "Variant Master." And then comma delimit, each of the ... part numbers over here, and then here make them the variants. Then you can put in the pricing. I'm going to go back up to my Acer because I'm going to try to stick with this thing here, but I'm just making sure as we go across these ... You can have an additional part manufacturer number if you want. Your price, your sale price.

Whether or not you want to allow back-ordering. Now all of these other columns, for the most part, are actual fields in the administrative interface. Some of them are made up. Anything that you make up is an attribute. That attribute can be a value pair like, "Unit of measure." "Each." Or, "Model number." And it's a value, so I call that a "Value pair." Or it can be like the long description here. Remember when I showed you the picture of mine, it had images. So here I put a paragraph tag, I put this nice image.

This is HTML code, so we can allow markup. Remember my description was really pretty and had all those laptops shown in there comparing the laptop model numbers against other model numbers. That was all done by me importing these graphics. So you can see here a CVI, Clarity Ventures, Inc. link. So I have my own server here where I throw my marketing materials that I want to make public. I put those graphics up there, and then I just went ahead and posted that here, so it can be easily important.

Now the other thing too, that I did import all of the graphics. If I scroll down a little bit here. I slide over ... my images. Here's image number one comma, image two comma, three comma, four comma, whatever. So basically all of my images are also on that server. So what I did was I created my ... If I click on this. Thousand by thousand images. I created this one image and then that image is imported.

And then this little thumbnail. This four-by-four thumbnail. The thumbnails for the checkout cart. When you go to the car. These are one inch by one inch. All of these different thumbnails are automatically created by our platform on the back end. So all you have to do is create one nice image. If you're going to turn on image zoom, you're going to want a nice image. So you create the biggest image. I have a whole other video that walks through image optimization, and the best way to create videos, that you'll want to watch that can help with that. So you put them comma delimited here and now I can start going through all my different attributes. Genre, hours, size, material, color, height, weight, things like that.

Now if you want to do shipping ... you can see as I come over here, and I have a ... it talks about the package. So not only did I have my weight and then my weight unit of measure, but then I've got my package weight right here and my package weight unit of measure in k. Now if I add these two columns and add the word, "Dimensional." Here, so I have packaged dimensional weight and now packaged dimensional weight unit of measure based on these two items, and then the actual width, height, and depth of the package.

We can send that to UPS, FedEx, or whatever, and we can get and calculate all your shipping rates. So you need to make sure that you've got the dimensional weight column and the dimension weight column measurement ... Those two columns have to be in there if you want to import and have shipping automatically calculated during checkout.

All right, I'll just kind of whip through these notes. You saw member I had that video. Well, here's the embed code right from YouTube. That's why it embedded that. And here's my bulleted specs. Same thing. Now those also showed up in my demo. If I go...if I click back here...those also showed up as tabs. So although it imported this HTML code, and it imported this video, those don't show up here as tabs until I actually go into the admin interface, I go to the attributes, I go to the bulleted spec attribute, and the notes attribute, and I have to toggle them to both allow markup and display as tabs. So just by doing that ... It took all of 30 seconds. Now all of my HTML code displays as HTML, and I have these additional tabs now showing up on all my products because I turned them on as such.

Stock quantities here, can be imported. And then the last couple, this is your SEO-friendly URL. So SEO URL, my SEO page title, here's my SEO meta description. And then most of my clients, I don't recommend using the SEO keywords, but I have a lot of clients that still do. They're kind of hung up on that even though Mas and Google and everybody tell us not to use them anymore. They still want to use them. So we can import those, and still, pull those in. But anyway, that kind of walks through the spreadsheet. Then you simply drag and drop the spreadsheet into your administrative interface and let it crank. And then you can view the products. So if you want to see that keep watching the video. All right, so here's the admin interface. I could just come right here from the dashboard, go to products, or I could obviously click on the menu, and go down to products. And then basically I'm going to pull this over, so you can kind of see this window.

So now what I'll do is, I'll come over here and click on, "Import products." And I can either flip to Google Sheets. We can do that securely because we require the Google API security key to be published. So I'm just going to do a spreadsheet and then I'm going to come over here and grab my import template. I'm going to drag it right here. It uploads the file and says, "I'm ready to import data." I click on the import data. It says, "Are you sure?" And this can't be undone. Now what this is going to do ... The great thing about this is if I already have the product and the custom key in there, this could be a spreadsheet done by marketing that all they did was add the SEO URL, and the meta descriptions, and they wrote all that out. Or maybe there are short descriptions and long descriptions. Maybe they added the images. all of that information wasn't imported from the CRM. So we needed that. So they created a spreadsheet with just those columns.

Maybe you had to go back and add the dimensional weights in another spreadsheet. So you can import these spreadsheets. It will look for things, and it will look at deltas that have already been done and only import the deltas. So in this case, I'm going to go ahead and click, "Yes." ... Okay. Now I had about 150 products, and I had ... Oh gosh, 1,000 images in my galleries. It took ... I looked at my clock and watched it. It was about 55 seconds, just to give you an idea. So that can run minutes depending on how many thousands of products and images and things like that. Now I'm in the middle, I was actually that new ... This V9, I was actually building that earlier today, and I'm in the middle of a building, a new Toro SS, 5500 product, so I haven't finished that. So an error occurred, but there was only one error with that one product. I know that that product isn't complete yet.

So I'll click on view products and then it'll take you right to the product view within the admin. And here are all my products, and they're all now imported with all of the ... You can see down here the Typekit. That's the kit and the bundles. So I created a peer-to-peer marketplace platform. There is the CIA learning system sparks one, two, and three books. And then just for the sake of building a bundle and showing people how bundles worked, I created a new skew, right, and I just incremented that skew up. And then I came over here, and I created a bundle, and I called it the parts one through three. And then I created my own custom graphic for it. And then I imported that as a kit and that's what it kind of shows up and at. So right now it's filtering by type and showing me all those products. That's how you can import.

Now if you don't have a spreadsheet. If you don't call your project manager, you need a spreadsheet, You can come right here and say, "Export to Excel." And it'll actually export all the products to a spreadsheet. And then you'll have your template, and then you can just go in and modify the products, update the products, make any changes you want, and turn around and then reimport it right back in. So hopefully that covers and helps you understand the importing via spreadsheet. It's usually an all-or-nothing. Most of our clients that don't have a CRM or an ERP, just use the spreadsheet import method. Many of our clients that have a CRM, or an ERP have a hybrid, where they'll be bringing in the products ... Usually the products, the pricing, and the stock quantities. That information is usually in the CRM or ERP.

We usually set up the integration, we hit a button, we pull all that information in, and then what we'll do is we'll come export this. Then they'll have to go into the spreadsheet and fill out the marketing, the short descriptions, and the URLs to the images. So the images can all be imported. If you only have a dozen or two products, you know, you can just go in manually and edit each product, right? Just right-click on a product and say edit and drag and drop your own images and, and fix your own information. But for me, all my SEO-friendly URL information, my product types, skews, pricing, and related products. All this information is all important via that spreadsheet. So hope that helps. Thanks for watching.

 

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