Advice please - site product/price maintenance

[Guy]

I am having a real issue keeping my site upto date at the moment. So I am hoping to understand how other people do it.

Here's the problem. I sell IT products and they have a limited life span, so I tend to get a number of discontinued products every week which need to be removed. I also need to update the pricing every couple of days because my suppliers tend to buy in dollars and the price changes regularly.

At the moment I receive a flat file which I convert to excel. I then have to compare each vendor file with the last one, to see which products are discontinued, this is extremely painful on the eyes and the concentration!! Each product then needs to be found and deleted out of both SAGE and Actinic.

This file is then saved as a CSV file and imported into sage, then I update Actinic via Actinic Link into hidden sections, any new products appear outside of these sections and need to be entered manually.

As you can see, this is a really long process and extremely time consuming. It is preventing me from adding additional vendors and products, as I am having to keep the site down to a managable size.

How do you do it? Is there an easier way please?
Any advice would be appreciated, thanks.

[delboy]

Hi Guy,

There really is no simple answer. If you're dealing with a number of suppliers (which I guess you are looking at your site), then they're going to supply information in the format that suits them. I have found that Excel does give the direct control that I need to verify that pricing on my site actually does reflect a price that I can make money on (with large numbers of products it's very easy to make a mistake).

I actually use 2 Excel sheets to control my site. One that deals with pricing and includes things like buying in costs, credit card clearance and shipping costs, along with margin analysis to compute the final selling price and another sheet which totally controls the site. The second sheet contains all the SECTION | HEADER | PRODUCT info that Actinic needs (including layouts, Keywords, Meta Descriptions, Image file pointers for both regular and pop-up type displays, product descriptions & VAT issues etc). Clearly sheet 1 links directly to sheet 2. Sheet 2 is imported into Actinic as a hierarchical file which totally renews the site data, BUT not the hard coded HTML / Javascript which defines the templates. I use 2 Excel sheets purely because I find them easier to read when you split the responsibilities of each sheet. Once you set up a system like this then the automation in Actinic kicks in. Even if you change the position of the headings in your hierarchical file, Actinic remaps to the correct location in the Access database (at the heart of the Actinic system) so renewing site data is easy.

This type of structure also has backup benefits in that I don't totally rely on the Actinic site snapshot backup system. I use the Actinic B/U system but I also back up my Excel sheets independently which gives me 2 separate sources to retrieve all site data and settings from, in the event of a disaster. Speaking from experience, disasters occur. It's a big subject but it's only then that you find out if your backups are worth anything. I prefer the belt'n braces route.

As I said earlier, with many sites there's no easy answer to product listing management and each site is different, just choose the tools that work best for you.

Delboy
www.usedigital.co.uk

[Guy]

Thanks Delboy!

I really appreciate the time taken to respond to my question. This has given me a few ideas in how I am to manage this.
Thanks again.

Guy.

[achugani]

looking to use actinic but concerned about maintainance

Hi ,

I have read your posts and would be very interested to know how you have sorted the problem.

We are an independant IT reseller (based in Gibraltar, will not be competing with you and we have an epos sytem from which we can export to csv "product ref" "brief description" and "price" and "stock level".

I envisage the same problems in maintaining the site. If i prepared the file by adding extended descriptions and product images to the file exported from the epos I am concerned as to how i can maintain the file to have the "extended description and image" to the "product ref- brief description - price" file which is automatically generated when i have to do an update. I would have to manually ammend the exported csv file and again put links to all the images and extended descriptions - loadsa work. Is there a way to automatically link the automatic file with "product ref / short desc / price" to the extended "description - image" so that they are automatically linked in the correct places and not have to be done manually each time? I would then just have to manually add the extended description and image for the new products.
thanks
Amit
Netgear
www.netgear.gi