How to Create and Upload a Product Database

Your product database, integrated with your shopping cart solution, will be at the informational heart of your online business. Create it carefully but simply. Back it up daily and let it serve as a workhorse to keep your business organized.

Instructions

Difficulty: Moderate

Things You’ll Need:

• Microsoft Excel software

Review Your Needs and Set Your Field Names

1. Save steps later by checking your existing or prospective selling venues, web hosting services and shopping cart hosts to see if they have a ready-made product database solution. Any product database should allow you to paste in boilerplate text or conduct a re-pricing operation on multiple products simultaneously.
2. Study your inventory and make a list of every field or type of data you need to track on your products, including marketing text and pictures.
3. Review your selling venues or other venues for products similar to yours. Research the data fields they include in multiple item uploads. Pay attention to the data field names and special conditions or conventions, such as allowed length of descriptive notes and item names, fields in which they use yes/no toggles and fields in which they use pull down menus.

Create and Upload Your Product Database

4. Create an Excel spreadsheet using field names as column headings. Use another spreadsheet or database program if you prefer, but Excel spreadsheets with their powerful "sort" operations and capacity to be reformatted as tab or comma delimited text have become the standard for such purposes. Do not use multiple worksheets in the same spreadsheet or text file.
5. Populate your spreadsheet with your products. Automate as much of the process as you are able, then fill in other columns manually. Don't be afraid to leave some columns blank or to "hide" them for future use.
6. Keep your product database in a separate, well organized folder and back it up regularly.
7. Change column headings as you need to accommodate your upload needs for different selling venues, but always label and save each iteration with a file name that expresses the file's data and purpose.
8. Upload your completed database to your website shopping cart and to a third party selling venue. For your initial test drive, try an upload with three or four items and review any errors or fixes before you upload your full inventory.

Tips & Warnings

• You don't need a professional programmer to create a product database. You just need a basic understanding of spreadsheet programs and someone to handle the data entry.
• The term "database" may seem daunting, but the key is simplicity. There may be nothing worth doing with a product database that cannot be done with an Excel spreadsheet either in worksheet or tab or comma delimited text mode. Later, if your website programming and features call for more complex database uploading and functions, you can easily export Excel files to Microsoft Access.