Preparing Products to Load into your Catalog-Admin

[raven]

If you are ready to start loading products to categories and sub categories into your admin you should take a few steps to make it a bit easier and organized.

You will need text for descriptions and photos of your products to load.

I make a folder in “My Documents” and put all the photos that I will be working with and loading into my shopping cart. I name the folder “1” this way it shows at the top.

The first thing you should do is check the size of your photos. Keep in mind that some people still use dial up although that is rare. You don’t want the photos to large, but you do want them clear and legible so your customer can see the item well. Most large photos can range from 10 to 50 KB. So check the size of your photos, resize if necessary and check the clarity after you resize them before you go further. Clarity is important. This is what will sell your product. Your large photo will be seen when they click on an item in the catalog and then click the “enlarge button”. The large photo gives the customer a good look at the product and all the detail to it.

 If you want you can rename your photo although you don’t have to, but it will give you an extra edge with the search engines. If you rename the photos do not use special characters and do not use spaces. An example for renaming a photo: if you have a blue votive candle you could rename it votive_candle_blue.  Rename the photo before you re size it to the medium image and the small thumbnail image. Otherwise you will be renaming the large, medium, and the thumbnail photos and this will cause extra work and possibly errors.

The next step is to re size your photos. As stated before you will start with your large photo of 10 to 50 KB in size and saved as a JPEG. This is the photo you will work with and re size to the smaller photos. The average size of a medium photo is 6 to 8 KB and will be roughly 200 x 200 in pixels. The small thumbnail photo is 2 to 5 KB and will be roughly 100 x 100 in pixels. The small thumbnail photo is the first photo the customer will see in your catalog. This is why you need a good thumbnail program. You need a program that makes the photo small enough but also keeps it clear and not distorted. The medium photo is the photo the customer will see when they click on the item and it brings them to that items page and the large is what they will see when they click on Enlarge Photo.

I save all my photos in the folder I have designated for this. Putting photos in one place will save you time looking for them.

Now you will need your text. If you are loading products have the item name, item number, the price, the weight and description all typed up and saved in Notepad or WordPad. Check your spelling.

Once you get started loading products you can load a product within 2 to 3 minutes if you have all of your info ready to go.

Sometimes I put the product info into notepad as I am ordering the products. I save the photos as I am choosing what products to order. I can prepare my products information and photos ahead of time and load it at my leisure. By the time the product are in stock everything is loaded into the admin and all’s I have to do is click the “on” button for the items. This is especially good to do when ordering for the holiday season. Being prepared ahead of time will allow you to devote your time to the customer and to promotions.

Whenever you are adding a product to a category or sub category in your admin, have the catalog open and your admin. When you add information to your catalog via the admin you can check to see how things look as you go along. When I add or make a change and I then go to that place in the catalog. You can just keep refreshing your catalog page to see the changes taking place. Always check your work in the catalog to make sure it looks right.

When you are done working in your admin make sure you back up your work. To do this, go to the main admin page. On the left side scroll down to the bottom where it says tools and click on that. Then click on Backup mySQL. This will bring you to a page called Database Backup Manager-MySQL.  You will see 2 buttons in the middle called “backup” or “restore”. You want to click on backup. Now you are at a page where you can choose how you want to back up either compressed or no compression.  Then just click backup and your done…