Uploading Product Data Fast and Getting Your Vendors to Help - Part 2 Ecommerce SEO

I can take a long time to manually enter the data for thousands of products into a site like OsCommerce. We have over 5000 products listed online. Close to 2000 manually entered. You could save a lot of time just calling up the vendor.

Any modern business keeps their product line in a database. And just about any database can export a .csv file of this data. Just ask your vendors to email you this file. You are selling their products. It is in their best interest to give you this info.

Any good ecommerce site should have a way to import data from a .csv file. Or you should be able to find a module or plugin. If you have to, hire a developer to create a way for importing data. It will be worth it.

Instead of taking pictures of items, ask your vendors if they have digital photos. Or go online. Some will have pictures of their product line on their website. Or they will have PDF files that you can download and extract the pictures from.

And if the vendor you are talking to only sells wholesale, ask him if he has a website. If so, ask for a link. This link will help you out a lot. Not only will it add Pagerank to your site, but it will be a direct link for anyone searching for the company online. And it should help the vendor out a lot by sending more customers to buy his products. In fact, these will probably be the best links you will ever get.

But if worse comes to worse get a good typist and get the products up. If you have less products than a competitor, people may come to your site looking for multiple items, not find everything and go on to the next site. And people like to bookmark sites like this. I know I do. I bookmark sites and come back and browse, because I know there’s other stuff there I need or want. If time or manpower is limited, focus on getting your products up before you even mess with a fancy template. People will buy from an ugly site.

Next in the series, watching your stats.