Clarity eCommerce Bulk Product Importing

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 one hundred and some-odd products 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, 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 and other products that I can upsell too. It's got other tabs, so it's got my bulleted specs and notes. I've even got a video.

All of this was imported via a spreadsheet. Every time the developers threw out a new version of the code, it allows me to import my spreadsheet and automatically set 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-V3-772G-9850-16GB-1TB. I created that URL, so this is the SEO-friendly URL that was also imported. So, basically what that means, now I'm going to 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 is alphabetically the first product in the spreadsheet. We're going to cover it at length. That means that I could break up and have multiple spreadsheets. One spreadsheet could import and set 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 graphics and the SEO-friendly URL meta tags. So, it just depends on what you want to do. The product import spreadsheet capability is to both create new and update products.

So, let's go ahead and start with my spreadsheet. 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. You can 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 get assigned to the appropriate category. So, you see those all change. So, let's just start. 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 SKU. Those are the only two fields required if 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 that, when I click on, it isn't 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 haven't assigned it to a category, 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 walk across these; product name, it's going to be an active product, I want it visible. Categories, as long as you create as many columns as you want as long as you call them all categories, this is the parent slash subcategory. So, in this case, I want it in the electronics parent category and the electronics computer subcategory. When I did the import, that automatically created 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 I kept having problems with this field. This field is these four products down here. So if you can see these SKU numbers down here, these are those SKU numbers in that spreadsheet, so when I go back to the spreadsheet, it's SKU, SKU, SKU, SKU. It's just delimited. The thing that kept happening when I was typing these numbers and commas kept converting those two numbers and then would say something like 4.3 plus whatever to the 18th power. That's 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 to text, it didn't treat it as a number, and 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. 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 depends on where these fields live if we're importing from your CRM or importing the products and quantities from the CRM, but the pricing and description 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. 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 then I'm selling black, gray, red, dark, and light versions of that product 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, so they're different prices so you can have different variants. I would have to set that up under the type column, call it variant master, and then comma delimit each of the part numbers over here, then make them the variance. Then you can put in the pricing.

Now I'm going to go back up to my Acer because I will try to stick with this thing here. Still, 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. For the most part, all of these other columns 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 a unit of measure 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 a picture of mine? It had images, so here I put a paragraph tag, I set this nice image, so this is HTML code to allow markup. Remember, my description was pretty and had all those laptops shown when comparing the laptop model numbers against other model numbers. That was all done by me importing these graphics.

So you can see here CVI, Clarity Ventures Inc, link. so I have my server here to throw the marketing materials that I want to make public. I put those graphics up there, and then I just went ahead and posted that in here so it could be easily imported. The other thing too I did for importing all of the graphics is if I scroll down a little bit here and slide over my images, here's image number 1, image 2, 3, 4, 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 image I created this one image and then that image is imported. Then this little thumbnail, this 4x4 thumbnail, the thumbnails for checkout cart, when you go to the cart these one inch by one inch, all of these different thumbnails are automatically created by our platform on the backend. So all you have to do is create one nice image if you're going to turn on image zoom. I have a whole other video that walks through image optimization and the best way to create videos that you'll want to watch to 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 it talks about the package. So not only do 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. Okay, now if I add these two columns and add the word dimensional in here. So I have package dimensional weight and now package 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, 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 remember ahead of that video? Well, here's the embed code right from YouTube. That's why it embedded that, and here are my bulleted specs the same thing. Those also showed up in my demo as tabs, so although it imported as HTML code, it embedded the video. Those don't show up here as tabs until I go into the admin interface. I go to the attributes, I go to the bulleted spec attribute, and the notes attribute. 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 can be imported here, and then the last couple, this is your SEO-friendly URL, SEO page title, SEO meta description, and SEO meta-keywords. Although most of my clients like to use the meta keywords, I don't recommend using SEO meta keywords since Moz, Google, and everybody else tells us not to use them anymore. If you still want to use them, we can import those and pull those in through the spreadsheet. Then you 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.

Alright, so here's the admin interface. I could just come right here from the dashboard, go to products, or click on the menu and go down to products. I'm going to pull this over so you can see this window. So now what I'll do is I'll come over here and click on import products. I could flip to Google Sheets as we can do that securely by requiring the Google API security key to be published. However, I'm just going to do a spreadsheet. 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. The great thing about this is if I already have the product and the custom key there. This could be a spreadsheet done by marketing where all they did was add the SEO URL, the meta descriptions, maybe the short descriptions and long descriptions, or even they may have added 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, they will look for things, and they will look for the deltas compared to the existing database. So, in this case, I'm going to go ahead and click yes.

I had about 150 products, and I had 1000 images in my galleries. I looked at my clock, and it was about 55 seconds to import. So just to give you an idea, it can run minutes depending on how many thousands of products and images you are importing. I was in the middle of building this new v9 earlier today, and I'm in the middle of building a new Toro SS 5500 product as well. I haven't finished that, so an error occurred, but there was only that one error with that one product. I know 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. Here are all my products, and they're imported with all of the data you can see down here. There's the type kit. That's the kit and the bundle I had created up there. There are the CIA Learning System parts 1, 2, and 3 books.

Then just for the sake of building a bundle and showing people how bundles worked, I created a new SKU I just incremented up, then I came over here, and I created a bundle, and I called it parts one through three. Then I created my own custom graphic for it, and then I imported that as a kit. That's what shows up and looks 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, and 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 export all the products to a spreadsheet. Then you'll have your template, and you can just go in and modify the products, update the products, make any changes you want, then re-import it right back.

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 who have a CRM and ERP have a hybrid where they'll bring in the products; usually, the products, the pricing, and the stock quantities. That information is usually in the CRM or ERP. We set up the integration and pull all that information in, and then we'll export the spreadsheet. Then they'll have to go into the spreadsheet and fill out the marketing data, short descriptions, the URLs to the images so the images can all be imported. If you only have a dozen or two products, you can manually edit each product. Just right-click on a product, edit, drag and drop your images, and fix your information. For me, all my SEO-friendly URL information, my product types and SKUs, pricing, and related products, all this information is all imported via that spreadsheet. So hope that helps.

Thanks for watching.