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Ron Halversen, vice-president of sales and marketing at Clarity Ventures, demonstrates how easy a bulk product import can be with Clarity's software.

Hi, Ron from Clarity. I want to walk you through importing products. The first thing I wanted to show you on the Clarity eCommerce platform is how I set up my demo site. So if I come in here just to show you one product, you can see here that the entire product catalog is all set up. I've got, I don't know, 100-some-odd products totally set up.

If I go into this Acer laptop, you can see that it's got all the products that I can zoom in on. It's got my picture gallery, all my thumbnails, it's got my price, my sell price, it's got my stock counts, short description. This is my long description, which includes nice pictures. It's got other attributes, it's got other products that I can upsell to. It's got other tabs, my bulleted specs, notes. I've actually got a video.

All of this was imported via a spreadsheet. Every time the developers throw out a new version of the code, I can literally import my spreadsheet and it automatically sets up all my products. Now the import—let me scroll down a little bit here—you can also see in my URL here, this product Acer Aspire Gaming Laptop V3 722G 16bg-1tb. I created that URL. So this is the SEO-friendly URL that was also imported.

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Here's my import spreadsheet that I used to set up that Acer laptop. So alphabetically, that's the first product in the spreadsheet. We're going to cover it at length. That means that I could break up and have multiple spreadsheets. One spreadsheet could import and set up the products. One spreadsheet could be by the inventory management people tracking stock quantities and price changes. One could be for marketing to do the descriptions, the graphics, and the SEO friendly. It just kind of depends on what you want to do. But the product import spreadsheet capability is to both create new and update products.

Let's go ahead and start with my spreadsheet. If I scroll down here, you can see it's just alphabetically organized and I've got, I don't know, 145 products or something like that in here. And you can basically see columns D, E, and F as I scroll up and down, this is where the products actually get assigned to the appropriate category. So you see those all change. To be real clear, the only fields that are absolutely required would be the product name, and, in our case—I call it the custom key—but that's the eCommerce SKU. Those are the only two fields if you wanted to import a product.

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Now, if I imported that product, would it show up? No, it would be in the admin interface, but it's not going to show up on the catalog because it doesn't have a URL so that when I click on it, it's going to display. Also, I haven't set it to active or visible in the catalog, so there's no reason why it would show up in the catalog. And then if I wanted to try to find it in the navigation, if I hadn't assigned it to a category, then it would be difficult to find. So even though these other fields are not necessarily required, I kind of feel like they are or your products aren't going to show up in the eCommerce product catalog.

So let's just kind of walk across these. Product name, it's going to be an active product. I want it visible. Categories, you can create as many columns as you want, as long as you call them all categories. This is the parent slash subcategory. In this case, I want it in the electronics parent category and the electronics computer subcategory. So when I actually did the import, that went and created automatically the electronics parent and then the electronics computer subcategory. So I could click see all and it would show up there and it would also show up underneath just the computer subcategory, because those are the two ways I wanted it to show up.

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Here's the custom key. That's the one unique identifier for that product. Now, one of the things that I was careful doing, I kept having problems with this field. This field is these four products down here. So if you can see these SKU numbers down here, these are those eCommerce SKU numbers that are in that spreadsheet. So when I go back to the spreadsheet, it's SKU, comma, SKU, comma, SKU, comma, SKU.

Now, the thing that kept happening when I was typing these numbers in commas, it kept converting those two numbers and then it would say something like 4.3 plus whatever to the 18th power. That's because I didn't change this whole column and format the cells and I had to do this numerous times on different things to text. Once I changed the whole cell to text, then it didn't treat it as a number, it didn't treat it as a currency, it didn't mess it up.

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One of the other things that I could have done, if I was smart, when I went to type this in, I could have come up here and I could have just started with an opening single quote. And that will, by default, automatically make that a text field by just including that single quote. And by definition, our parser will parse those out when it imports the file. So if you want to be safe, you could do that. But it kind of depends on where these fields live. If we're importing from your CRM or if we're importing the products and quantities from the CRM, but the pricing and description from a spreadsheet and then the marketing team has to do all the SEO stuff in another spreadsheet, right? You just kind of have to know what spreadsheets are required.

This is the type of product. Now, basically what that means is if it is a variant master, so you can see that I have an Amazon Echo as a master product, and then I'm selling black, gray, red, dark, and light versions of that product as variants with different prices. So if I scroll over here and look at the price, as you can see, some are $99 on sale for $84, some are $109 on sale for $95. They're different prices, so you can have different variants on the eCommerce platform.

The way I would have to set that up is under the type column, call it variant master, and then comma delimit each of the part numbers over here, and then here make them the variants. Then you can put in the pricing. I'm going to go back up to my Acer because I'm going to try to stick with this thing here. You can have an additional part manufacture number if you want your price, your sale price, whether or not you want to allow back ordering.

Now, all of these other columns, for the most part, some of them are actual fields in the administrative interface. Some of them are made up. Anything that you make up is an attribute on the eCommerce framework. That attribute can be a value pair like "unit of measure each" or "model number," and it's a value. So I call that a "value pair," or it can be like the long description here—remember when I showed you the picture mine? It had images—so here I put a paragraph tag. I put this nice image.

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This is a HTML code so we can allow markup. Remember, my description was really pretty and had all those laptops shown in there comparing the laptop model numbers against other model numbers. That was all done by me importing these graphics. So you can see here, CVI, Clarity Ventures Inc. I have my own server here that I throw in my marketing materials that I want to make public. I put those graphics up there and then I just went ahead and posted that in here so it could be easily imported.

Now the other thing. for importing all of the graphics. If I scroll down a little bit here, slide over my images, here's image number one, comma, image two, comma, three, comma, four, comma, whatever. So basically all of my images are also on that server. What I did was I created my thousand by thousand image, I created this one image and then that image is imported. And then this little thumbnail, this four by four thumbnail, the thumbnails for the checkout cart. When you go to the cart these one inch by one inch, all of these different thumbnails are automatically created by our eCommerce platform on the back end. So all you have to do is create the one nice image.

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If you're going to turn on image zoom, you're going to want a nice image, so you create the one biggest image. I have a whole other video that walks through image optimization and the best way to create videos that you'll want to watch that can help with that. So you put them comma delimited here and now I can start going through all my different attributes genre, our size, material, color, height, weight, things like that.

Now, if you want to do shipping, you can see as I come over here...it talks about the package. So not only do I have my weight and then my weight in the measure, but then I've got my package weight right here and my package weight unit of measure. if I add these two columns and add the word "dimensional" in here, so I have package dimensional weight and now package dimensional weight unit of measure based on these two items. And then the actual width, height, and depth of the package, we can send that to UPS API integration, FedEx, whatever, and we can get and calculate all your shipping rates. So you need to make sure that you've got the dimensional weight column and the dimension weight column measurement. Those two columns have to be in there if you want to import and have shipping automatically calculate it during checkout.

I'll just kind of whip through these. Notes, you saw. Remember I had that video. Well, here's the embed code right from YouTube. That's why it embedded that. And here's my bulleted specs. Same thing. Now, those also showed up in my demo, those also showed up as tabs. So although it imported this HTML code and it imported this video, those don't show up here as tabs until I actually go into the admin interface. I go to the attributes, I go to the bulleted spec attribute and the notes attribute, and I have to toggle them to both on the eCommerce platform to allow markup and display as tabs.

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So just by doing that, it took all of 30 seconds. Now all of my HTML code displays as each HTML and I have these additional tabs now showing up on all my products because I turned them on.

Stock quantities here can be imported. And then the last couple, this is your SEO-friendly URL. So SEO URL, my SEO page title. Here's my SEO meta description. And then most of my clients I don't recommend you use the SEO keywords, but I have a lot of clients that still do. They're kind of hung up on that, even though Moz and Google and everybody tells us not to use them anymore. They still want to use them so we can import those and still pull those in.

But anyway, that kind of walks through the spreadsheet and then you simply drag and drop the spreadsheet into your administrative interface and let it crank, and then you can view the products. So if you want to see that, keep watching the video. So here's the admin custom user interface. I could just come right here from the dashboard, go to products, or I could obviously click on the menu, go down to products. And then basically, I'm going to pull this over so I can kind of see this window.

So now what I do is I'll come over here and click on import products and I can either flip to Google sheets, we can do that securely because we require the Google API security key to be published. So I'm just going to do a spreadsheet and then I'm going to come over here, grab my import template. I'm going to drag it right here. It uploads the file and says, "I'm ready to import data." I click on the import data. It says, "Are you sure?" And this can't be undone.

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Now what this is going to do, the great thing about this is, if I already have the product and the custom key in there, this could be a spreadsheet done by marketing that all they did was add the SEO URL, the meta descriptions, and they wrote all that out. Or maybe the short descriptions and long descriptions. Maybe they added the images. All of that information wasn't imported from the CRM. So we needed that. So they create a spreadsheet with just those columns. Maybe you had to go back and add the dimensional weights in another spreadsheet. So you can import these spreadsheets. It will look for things and it will look at deltas that have already done and only import the deltas.

So in this case, I'm going to go ahead and click "yes." Now, I had about 150 products and I had, oh, gosh, a thousand images in my galleries. It took—I looked at my clock and watched it—it was about 55 seconds. So just to give you an idea, that can run minutes depending on how many thousands of products and images and things like that. I was actually building that earlier today and I'm in the middle of building a new Toro SS 5500 product, so I haven't finished that. So an error occurred, but there was only that one error with that one product. I know that that product isn't complete yet, so I'll click on View Products and then it'll take you right to the product view within the admin.

Here's all my products and they're all now imported with all of the you can see down here the Typekit, that's the kit and the bundle. So I had created up here the learning system sparks one, two and three books. And then just for the sake of building a bundle and showing people how bundles worked, I created a new eCommerce SKU, right? I just incremented that SKU up. And then I came over here and I created a bundle and I called it parts one through three, and then I created my own custom graphic for it, toss it into an eCommerce wireframe, and then I imported that as a kit, and that's what it kind of shows up and looks at. So right now it's filtering by type and showing me all those products. That's how you can import.

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Now, if you don't have a spreadsheet, if you don't call your project manager, you need a spreadsheet, you can come right here and say, "export to Excel," and it'll actually export all the products to a spreadsheet and then you'll have your template and then you can just go in and modify the eCommerce products, update the products, make any changes you want and turn around and then re-import it right back in.

So hopefully that covers and helps you understand the importing via spreadsheet. It's usually an all-or-nothing. Most of our clients that don't have a CRM or an ERP, they just use the spreadsheet import method. Many of our clients that have a CRM or an ERP have a hybrid where they'll be bringing in the products—usually the products, the pricing, and the stock quantities—that information is usually in the CRM or ERP.

We usually set up the integration, we hit a button, we pull all that information in, and then what we'll do is will come export this. Then they'll have to go in to the spreadsheet and then fill out the marketing, the short descriptions, the URLs to the images so the images can all be imported. If you only have a dozen or two products, you know, you can just go in manually and edit each product, right? Just right click on a product and say edit and drag and drop your own images and fix your own information. But for me, all my SEO-friendly URL information, my product types, SKUs, and pricing and related products, all this information, this is all imported via that spreadsheet. 

Hope that helps, thanks for watching.

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