When I started in this I assumed that it would be possible to maintain and update the site by exporting the catalogue, modifying and re-importing. The ability to do that seemed to me to be essential. There are certainly occasions when you will want to do a complete import - for example when you want to adjust all your prices, as I am doing at present. But there will be other times when you need to make some quick minor corrections, which are most easily done in the GUI. If you do that the catalogue will be out of sync with the .csv file that originally created it. In that case, any major overhaul will have to start with capturing such changes by export.
It doesn't seem to be that easy. When I started work on a major overhaul, a couple of weeks back, I was unpleasantly surprised to find that the exported file contained no prices. That's a problem I was fortunately able to solve, but it was laborious and fraught with possibility of error.
I also had trouble with some of the Full Descriptions, which contained HTML links that were stripped from the export, and had to be recreated manually. This is of some importance, because links in Full Description are much more likely to be seen and used than ones on Extended Information pages. I was therefore thinking of moving wholesale to putting the links in the Full Description, but if Sellerdeck is going to keep stripping them that's asking for trouble.
I'm considering installing Soapbox. That leaves me really exposed, because of all the new content it will create that is not in my spreadsheet, and which I would wipe out if I did something like raising my prices and re-importing without basing the file on an export.
Am I missing something? How can it be that an export doesn't include prices? Are later versions of Sellerdeck equally brutal with my data? And if I attempt an export with Soapbox data what sort of chaos might that lead to?
Should I retire?
It doesn't seem to be that easy. When I started work on a major overhaul, a couple of weeks back, I was unpleasantly surprised to find that the exported file contained no prices. That's a problem I was fortunately able to solve, but it was laborious and fraught with possibility of error.
I also had trouble with some of the Full Descriptions, which contained HTML links that were stripped from the export, and had to be recreated manually. This is of some importance, because links in Full Description are much more likely to be seen and used than ones on Extended Information pages. I was therefore thinking of moving wholesale to putting the links in the Full Description, but if Sellerdeck is going to keep stripping them that's asking for trouble.
I'm considering installing Soapbox. That leaves me really exposed, because of all the new content it will create that is not in my spreadsheet, and which I would wipe out if I did something like raising my prices and re-importing without basing the file on an export.
Am I missing something? How can it be that an export doesn't include prices? Are later versions of Sellerdeck equally brutal with my data? And if I attempt an export with Soapbox data what sort of chaos might that lead to?
Should I retire?
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