Getting your product information ready for importing to your website

Product imports are an inevitable part of any ecommerce project.

At some point the information you have on your products wherever it may be stored – EPOS systems, paper catalogues, back of your head – needs to be upload to your website.

This is often a difficult part of the project to explain, but your data is EVERYTHING. Without good data with clear product information your website is not going to do anything. All your products will at least need:

• Product code (SKU) or at least the manufacturers code.
• Title a unique title for each product
• Some form of description preferably two (a short one sentence intro, and a fuller detailed description of the product)
• price what you’ll expect customers to pay (usually excluding VAT)
• category how you want your products grouped together on your website

Before even thinking about getting an ecommerce website set up you should be considering how to get all that information together in one place preferably a spreadsheet of sorts.

I’m going to be expanding this post out as there are way too many attributes.