Question
how do you list/upload items to your store?
i sell unique, vintage items. I duplicate listings in my webstore, in other words everything in my webstore is also in my ebay store.
I use oscommerce. it has an upload feature where I can upload from a spreadsheet. the problem is getting my ebay listings into a spreadsheet.
I use auctionsage and Mr. Corea told me how to save my inventory as a csv file. problem is, no spreadsheet I have found so far will open the description right. It either looks at every comma as a new field or every <br> command as a new field, but either way totally messes up the description field and makes it unuseable.
if I could save my ebay listings in a USEABLE/readable csv file then I could add the additional columns oscommerce needs (like catalog category etc). and upload.
right now all I can do is copy and paste and on dialup that is just getting to be too much time invested. I am trying to increase my ebay store listings and would like to increase my webstore listings as well but I am not willing to put items in my webstore only, I just don't get enough exposure yet.
to increase listings in my webstore, I have to figure out a way to load the already created listings faster. does anyone have any ideas? someone told me they are working on a program that will download a csv file from auctionsage right but it might be awhile before it's done.
increasing my webstore listings for the new year is one business goal and I'm working during this holiday downtime trying to get that ability setup but drawing a blank. I have downloaded several trial spreadsheets and databases from the web hoping they would read the csv file created by auctionsage right but so far no luck.
If there is another program or service out there that this works right on, I'd be willing to switch from auctionsage and would want to do that the first of the year. as a last resort, does anyone know a service where this is possible? I use a template with auctionsage but all I need is for the description to be saved and formatted right, not any of the html associated with the template which I don't use on my website.
As always, thank you in advance.
Answer
uses the paypal shopping cart. So when I need to add a product, I just edit the relevant page, insert rows into the table, add the picture, text, and Paypal Add to Cart button, and save my work.
I also add the item to my Froogle file for monthly uploading to them.
Answer
Since space is cheap these days, I work things differently. I setup a directory hirearchy to group products on my local drive. I then create a mirror of the directories on my space storage. I upload all the pics within one directory at a time. Even though I may not have the item listed anywhere, I still leave the pics out there. Whenever I load an auction or something onto my website, I no longer have to worry about uploading the picture. If I need to do maintenance and cleanup, I simply erase a whole remote directory and upload all the pics again for that one directory.
If I need to add pics due to new products, I have a temp directory (i.e. upload1) where I store the pics until I can upload it. Once I upload them, I move them to the appropriate dir on my local drive. This help to keep the mirror without a need to upload every pic in a dir each time.
I generally have several thousand pics out there and this is the only method I came up with to reasonably manage them.
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I want to list the same item in my webstore that is already in my ebay store. I already have the pic uploaded and the listing made in auctionsage. I'd like to figure out a way to upload all of my inventory in auctionsage to my webstore or somehow grab my items from ebay and upload those to my webstore instead of having to write every listing twice. Right now, all I can do is copy and paste into either a spreadsheet or into the oscommerce create new item page. I'd like to find a faster way
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maybe I should explain more how oscommerce works.
I can copy the descripton into a spreadsheet along with everything else about a listing and then upload that spreadsheet to oscommerce. but that takes too long per item (again, I am listing all unique items). I just think that is too much time to invest per item to create a listing in auctionsage and recreate the exact same one for my webstore. if I can't figure out a way to relist into my webstore, I'll have to drop it and concentrate only on ebay. I do get the occasional sale from my webstore and would like to duplicate my listings there, but more efficiently. thanks again.
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I use auctionsage and Mr. Corea told me how to save my inventory as a csv file. problem is, no spreadsheet I have found so far will open the description right. It either looks at every comma as a new field or every <br> command as a new field, but either way totally messes up the description field and makes it unuseable.
Why can't you use some other delimiter in the csv file? I think other common ones are the tab key and the semicolon. One of those would probably work for you.
If not, you can choose the delimiter used when you put the file into Excel. See what the options are for saving it from Auctionsage.
Answer
mel-
My oscommerce spreadsheet took some work to fix too. I had several hundred items, all unique, and it saved me time to do this from a data perspective instead of line by line.
What jayne said is VERY important. If you can get auctionsage to export using a different delimiter - something other than you normally find in your listings - you will save ALOT of time.
If you have a column (or more) that needs some special attention, it is wise to copy the columns to a new (temporary) spreadsheet to do the manipulation and then copy them back to your spreadsheet (as a new column at the end of the existing rows). Then use the sanctioned oscommerce column headings on the columns headed for oscommerce and your "streetname/personal" headings for what YOU are used to seeing. Don't overlay your original columns, just in case. (Word to the wise from the experienced.)
Anyway, while you have these column(s) copied out, that is when you need to do search and replaces to get rid of extra editing, html code, change formatting, etc.
If you can't get enough "features" in Excel's search and replace, you can open the spreadsheet in WordPad or something similar that won't try to interpret the ;'>" type characters for you. See if you can do other seach and replaces there. You can change delimiters this way, but you will have to monitor each replace to visually choose between a good character and one that should be replaced. If you need to go this route, you might want to check the results by merging the result into a formated WORD document just to double-check your accuracy... like in your merge file, "center" each field and create a "linebreak" after each one of your fields so that you can see quickly if there are too many blank lines or unusual linebreaks. Perhaps change fonts every other field to give you a visual quick, huh? if you see something out of pattern.
With oscommerce you either overlay EVERYTHING or add new records. I don't think there is "replace" function, so if you send up duplicates you will see duplicates -- the previous one will not be deleted.
We loaded my 200+ records first and have since been manually updating the rest. We don't have mass-updates to do. If you want to be uploading from mass groups, then make sure you document what you have to do to 'massage' the auctionsage file.
The documentation for oscommerce shows what fields are required. If you are using their column headings, you can choose the order of your columns - highly recommended.
A suggestion: If you keep a master Excel spreadsheet that has information for both auctionsage and oscommerce, you can put all your item data in ONE place and be independent of the database formats that your software use. (More like, platform independent, a good thing.) I used Word's Merge to create most of my auction listings on those 200+ items. It included my photo names and locations, item details, item descriptions (used a second merge to add the html for ebay and a third merge to create the html for the website). Then I manually added auction info when I wanted to, but auctionsage probably manages that for you.
Too much information? Hopefully this will give you a chance to give us some more good questions! LOL
gw4m
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no no, not too much info at all, thank you! to both of you.
jayne, I'm going to look into that, thanks! corea puts quotes around the description field but it doesn't help. the fields themselves are then seperated by commas.
someone just wrote a new program for auction sage, the guy that wrote launchfreedom. its a program to convert the csv file into the right format for the bulk lister for overstock.com. He thought I might could use that for my website so definitely going to look into that as well.
gw4m,
is what you are saying is you put your items in a spreadsheet/database and then launch from there to both oscommerce and to ebay? or to auctionsage? I've wondered if there is some way I could do that as well, write eveyrthing in a spreadsheet then copy and paste into auctionsage. or edit the csv from AS with notepad or something to strip out the html. I'll never get my webstore well stocked at this rate though, I really need to find a time effective way to either create in AS and upload to oscommerce or create in oscommerce and upload to AS ! someone has written an add on for oscommerce I see that will send your store listing to ebay as an auction so I may have to look into that as well.
I thought with so many on this board and ebay boards starting their own websites that surely I can't be the only one listing duplicate listings I just don't get the traffic to warrant unique listings for the webstore (and can't really see ever doing that, why not get double the exposure in the ebay store for 3 cents a month).
thank you again to both of you for giving me some ideas and some direction(s) to go in !
Happy Holidays!
Answer
mel-
I have set up examples of what I started with and a few of the iterations that I went through to get from my original spreadsheet (targeted at tracking eBay auctions) to a more generic spreadsheet (inventory control) which I can use to generate oscommerce spreadsheets.
I have 4 spreadsheets and 2 word merge documents that you can look at. I can't seem to ftp anything to my webspace, so if you are interested, PM me with your email address and I can send them as email attachments.
this applies to anyone here at here... I have some example copies of my oscommerce available to here folks. PM if you are interested in getting copies. hopefully I can get them to the web one of these days...
gw4m
Answer
mel-
oops, I upload to x-cart, not oscommerce, but the general concepts should be the same...
gw4m