Add New Products Remotely?

[intrapreneur]

I would like to use the services of a company based in India to add masses of new products to an Actinic store (V8.5.3 Multi Site) and have been racking my brains as to the best way to do this.

I could use the Flat File Import method, but there are some issues with that which make it tricky although not impossible, or I could send them a snapshot (minus customer details/orders obviously) but they would need a copy of Actinic to do that, or I could use something like Logmein to give them access to a PC here, but security issues would be a bar to that.....

Anyone got any better ideas?

[Duncan Rounding]

Importing would be your best bet.
What issues are you seeing as being a problem with this?

[intrapreneur]

Importing would be your best bet.
What issues are you seeing as being a problem with this?

Well its not really an Actinic issue, its just that some of the new products text details could be cut and pasted into Excel from HTML pages, but doing that even using Paste Special/Text causes line break issues. More than that its really down to visualising what the finished Product Details will look like when imported into Actinic with relevant images - difficult when you are working in Excel!

[jont]

I had a similar issue with a new site and all the product data provided by the clients supplier in spreadsheet format. The only solution was to clean the data first in Excel and then in the database directly. This still missed things but it did get 95% of a 1000 product site into Actinic in a usable format and then go through each to mop up anything that was missed.

I would not want to be doing it on a regular basis as it would be easier to copy and paste the text from Word as this suffers less with formatting and addition character code issues than Excel.

[pinbrook]

I tend to cleanse everything that comes to me as ms word/excel in notepad++ before doing anything

[Duncan Rounding]

'CSVed' is pretty good, but not so easy to use. Free as well.

[Sean Williams]

We've had to do this three times, using data from spreadsheets and although it does crack the problem of dealing with the sheer volume of products - you will certainly then have to go through it 'by hand' after import to check on things.
I agree with Jonty - clean up the spreadsheet first and expect some import errors.
Don't forget to get all required images present before you import!
Also - there is Excel adding spurious empty rows, which can throw the Actinic import routine.

[NormanRouxel]

Another route:

Send a Snapshot containing a full Section structure but no products or Brochure pages.

The service company adds all the products as required. They save all images into a sub-folder of the site.

Then they save the site via File / Export to create a hierarchical file containing the Sections and new Products.

They send you this file and the folder with all the images.

Copy images into same folder on main system.

Use File / Import / Hierarchical Import to import all the new products.

Done.

They can also periodically upload the work in progress site to a test server and you can then see what they've done.

[intrapreneur]

Another route:

Send a Snapshot containing a full Section structure but no products or Brochure pages.

The service company adds all the products as required. They save all images into a sub-folder of the site.

Then they save the site via File / Export to create a hierarchical file containing the Sections and new Products.

They send you this file and the folder with all the images.

Copy images into same folder on main system.

Use File / Import / Hierarchical Import to import all the new products.

Done.

They can also periodically upload the work in progress site to a test server and you can then see what they've done.

Ah yes but they would need a copy of Actinic to do this...but thanks for the suggestion Norman

[pinbrook]

Ah yes but they would need a copy of Actinic to do this...but thanks for the suggestion Norman

as far as licensing is concerned this would be ok. The restriction is one license per live webshop so the peeps adding products would not contravene this

[intrapreneur]

Blimey I had heard that you were a genius and now I know it! Many thanks