Your Own Online Shop Lesson 1

Prior to starting your very own online store, you will have to do a couple of things. First of all, you may want to organize all the pictures of your items you want to list in folders by groups/types of products. For instance, I have my sorted into folders called earrings, gloves, necklaces, scrunchies, etc. That way when I begin inputting my items into the store software I can put in all of my earrings at the same time and not have to be looking all over my computer for the pictures I want to include with the listings. You will probably want to make sure that they are the best pictures you can take, in normal lighting and on a plain white or neutral background. If you have a lightbox with a white background then all the better. If you have your items listed on Etsy or Amazon Handmade you probably already have your pictures ready.

The second thing really depends on whether or not you already have your items listed elsewhere online or if you are starting from scratch. We will talk about the second option in next post and the first in this one. We only have ours on Etsy, HandmadeArtists and Amazon Handmade. If you have your items listed on Shopify or some other sales website the procedures will be different and you will have to research them for yourself.

So, with Etsy you can download your items you have listed with them by going into your Shop Dashboard, under the heading Settings and then Options. There is a Download Data tab to click on. There you will be given the option of downloading a CSV file of your Current Listings For Sale that will include, among other things, Title, Description, Tags, etc. Sadly, at this time you cannot download your SKU number even though they recently added that feature to your items page towards the bottom. Once you have your file downloaded you will want to open it up and tweak it a little bit. If you do not access to Microsoft Excel you may want to download OPENOFFICE. It is a FREE version of the Microsoft Office Suite of programs. The spreadsheet portion of this program is called Calc. It operates similarly to Excel but not exactly. To get your columns of information correct you want to open the program first then open a spreadsheet, find your file and click to open. A small box will pop up to ask how the CSV file is marked between columns. I believe Etsy uses a comma.

The program has a preview screen so you can see where the columns will be created. Once you click OK then the information on your Active Listing on Etsy will appear. You will not need some of the columns such as where the images are stored. Once you close your Etsy store you will not have access to them anyway. You will need to add a column for the SKU number and then input one in for each item.

You cannot download an inventory file on HandmadeArtists. If you use their service you should have already started a spreadsheet to keep track of those items. Now for Amazon Handmade, you will sign into your seller account, click on the Inventory tab and Inventory Reports. Click on the button and create a Custom report of all Active items only. This may take a few minutes depending on the number of items you have listed with them. You don’t need anything that you have already sold out on. You can always go back and create a spreadsheet of Inactive items later prior to closing your account. The file that Amazon allows you to download is a Text file.

This one you will need to open a little differently to get it to work properly. First, you will need to find the file you downloaded on your hard drive. Most of the time people just send them to the Downloads folder. Right-click on the name of the text file and use the “Open With” function. Search for the Calc or Excel program and click OK. Then you will get the import box again. You can use the preview function to see where the columns end. If it doesn’t look right change the Separated By box to Tabs instead of Commas. Then you should see each column with the associated data. There are some columns that you will not need including Amazon’s Listing ID and a few others. Just click on the column. Once it is highlighted then you can change the column type to “Hide” and it should not import those or wait until the program opens the file and just delete the columns you don’t want.

Now you want to compare the two or three files and merge them together. To import these items into WooCommerce you will need to have the same name for the Categories, Different SKU numbers for each items, Number of each item, Amount Being Charged, Title of the Item, and Item Description. You may want to keep the Tags column as well.

Finally, you will need to “SAVE AS” the file into a CSV file and click on the box “Edit Filter Settings”. Click on save and another box pops up to “Keep the Format” and change the file settings – see the picture below.

Once you have the pictures you want to add to your items and the CSV text file you will be ready to import your listings into WooCommerce or just about any other program that allows you to import your listings in bulk. Next time we will discuss what comes next and how to import the file.

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