Getting Started

I'm probably the last person in the universe to open an online store. I'm probably the last person in the universe who should open an online store. I don't know how this is going to work out but, if I can make it work, anyone can.

I opened hifashionloprice about two weeks ago. The store is hosted by ProStores and, so far, all my products are from Doba.

I've read a lot of great advice on starting and running an online store but there are a few things I had to learn on my own.

The first thing I learned was that the product data from my supplier is not in the same format my store needs for uploading multiple products at the same time. The second thing I learned is that the shipping fees my store charges are not the same as the shipping fees my supplier charges.

The data from the supplier can be downloaded in many file types. I downloaded a CSV file. CSV stands for "comma separated values". Each product has a series of fields like name, id, description, price, etc. Each of these fields is separated from the other fields with a comma. At the end of the fields the product data is terminated with a line return, pretty much like when you hit "ENTER" on your keyboard.

This CSV file can be opened with Microsoft Excel or other spreadsheet to simplify working with the data. The first line of the spreadsheet will contain the field names: ID, description, price, quantity, etc. Each line below that will contain all the information about one product. And there can be thousands of products! One file contained more products than I could fit into an Excel file! (that's more than 65,535 products!)

Next I downloaded a template from my store that showed me the format to use when uploading products to the store. OF COURSE the upload template was different than the product file I just downloaded from my supplier. Some of the field names were different such as "title" in the product file was "product" in the upload template.

I created a file with the upload template field names in the first row. I then inserted links from that file to the product file so that the data from the product file would appear in the upload file under the correct field name.

Once all the data was in the correct place under the correct field names, I saved the new file as another CSV file. I went to the upload section of my store and uploaded my first products. Or so I thought. I had made several mistakes in the field names so the file was rejected by my store. Since the file was HUGE it took an hour before I knew there was a problem.

OK, learned something new. When first uploading a file, make a test file with just one or two products. The file will upload or fail in a few seconds and you can quickly make corrections. Otherwise, you will have to wait an hour or so before finding out you made a mistake. You will probably make several mistakes at first so a test file could save you a lot of hours waiting for uploads to finish.

Once I got the test file to upload correctly, I used the first row of the test file for my "real" file with a few thousand items. After an hour, I again learned something new. My file was larger than the maximum file size my store allowed. Another hour wasted. I divided my file into four files so that each one was under the maximum allowed size. Each file took a lot less time and uploaded successfully.

Of course I immediately went to my site to see how my products looked in the store. And once again, I learned something new. Each of my products was showing a dozen times, each with its own picture and description. It seems my supplier lists each size and color combination as a separate product. This did not make my store very user friendly for my customers. If I would ever get any, that is.

Back to my Excel files. I sorted my data by product id so that all the XYZ widgets were together. I then wrote a macro to combine products that differed only by color and size. The store allows custom fields so I created a "Size" field and a "Color" field, listing all the sizes and colors, separating each color and size by a comma as in "7, 7.5, 8, 8.5, 9".

And again, I learned something new. The macro was placing size 10 before size 7, "1" being less than "7". There is a way to correct that but I let it be for now.

Once again I uploaded a test file with the products condensed by product id and all the sizes and colors listed for each product id. It worked! So I uploaded my latest and greatest data file and finally had products showing in my store that customers could find, then choose a size and color.

Now I could have entered the data for each product directly into a form at my store. And, if you are only going to sell a few items, you can avoid all the upload hassle. But I was going to sell a BUNCH of products and didn't have a year and a half to do the data entry of each product, one at a time.

Next time I'll talk about shipping charges and shipping costs. A hint: charges should be larger than or equal to your costs.