ShopSite Newsletter – February 2007

[AnonymousParticipant]

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February 2007 ShopSite Newsletter
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In this month’s issue:
* ShopSite 8.2 now available
* Database uploads with ShopSite

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ShopSite 8.2 now available…

ShopSite has released the latest version of its e-commerce software, version 8.2.1.1. The 8.2 version introduces new features such as improved image management, the ability to create thumbnails and resized graphics automatically, support for Google Sitemaps, Google Analytics, and Froogle. A full list of new features can be found at:

http://www.shopsite.com/help/8.2/en-US/new-features.html

LexiConn has fully tested the new release and it is currently running for many of our clients. If you are already running versions 8.0 or 8.1, or you lease the software, the upgrade is free of charge. You may request an upgrade at:

https://lexiconn.com/lexiconn/shopsite_v82_upgrade.html

Upgrades are completed within two business days at most after receiving the upgrade request, and are seamless and require no re-work by the merchant.

A few things to note:
1. The Froogle feed system in ShopSite may not work for stores with a large number of products. ShopSite is actively working on a fix for this.

2. If you are considering using the Google sitemap feature in ShopSite, make sure you research it thoroughly, as setting up an incorrect sitemap, or even just adding a correct google sitemap, may alter your rankings with Google. If you are already well indexed in Google, you may not want to add a Sitemap. A google sitemap works well for new sites, or for sites where all of your pages may not be linked from your site (so google can find these hard to reach pages).

You can learn more about Google Sitemaps and signup for a Google Webmaster Tools account at:
http://www.google.com/webmasters/sitemaps/

It’s a great resource offered by Google. Once you have your account verified with Google, this tool gives you lots of information about your site and how Google is indexing it and what problems Google may encounter when crawling your site.

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Database uploads with ShopSite…

Uploading your pages and products data to ShopSite is a convenient way to quickly make changes and add new products. Instead of going through the backoffice screens, you can simply upload data from your favorite spreadsheet or database program. ShopSite’s upload system is easy to use, but it does have a few requirements and formatting rules for it to work smoothly.

The best format for your upload file is a tab delimited text file. This means each entry is on one line, and each column or field is separated by a tab. Excel and MS Access can easily export their data to a tab delimited text file. We’ll talk about Excel issues in more detail below.

The first row in your upload file should be a list of field names that match up with the database field names in ShopSite. A great way to see what these fields are is to download your products database from ShopSite, and open it in Excel or MS Access. The first row will be a list of all the field names. You can also see a description of all the fields ShopSite can accept in the help docs at:

http://www.shopsite.com/help/8.2/en-US/sc/pro/upload.fields.html

Note that you do not have to upload every field. You only need to upload those fields that you want to add/alter (i.e. just name/sku and inventory for a quick inventory update). Also, the first field header in the first row of your upload file should be preceeded with the pound “#” sign, which tells ShopSite this is your header row. For example, if you are uploading the fields Name, SKU, and Price, your first row would look like:

#Name SKU Price

Once you have your upload file ready, you can upload it in the ShopSite backoffice under:
Utilities -> Database -> Upload

Make sure the field separator is set to “Tab”, and the item separator set to the pipe “|” character. On the next screen, make sure all of your fields are matched up with ShopSite. One important option is the “Unique product identifier”. If all of your product names are unique, you can set this to Name. If you use SKUs and those are all unique, set it to SKU. If you set it to “None” then ShopSite will add each product as a new product.

Excel issues:
Excel has a few quirks that can make exporting to a tab delimited text file more cumbersome and not have the expected results.

The first issue is Excel will start removing tabs if the last column or columns are blank for many rows. This will cause ShopSite to error out complaining about missing tabs. The workaround is to add a column at the end of your data named “Junk” for example, and make sure there is text in each row (an “x” in each row works fine). Then, when uploading to ShopSite, just tell ShopSite to ignore the “Junk” column. This way Excel will not start stripping off blank tabs at the ends of rows.

The other Excel issue has to do with the software adding quotation marks around fields that have commas or other special characters. There are 2 workarounds for this:

1. The easiest method is to highlight all of your data in your Excel sheet with the mouse, copy it (Edit -> Copy or right click -> Copy), open notepad (Start -> Programs -> Accessories -> Notepad) and paste the contents into notepad. This will automatically create a tab delimited text file in the proper format that you can then save and upload to ShopSite.

2. You can open the tab delimited text file in Microsoft Word and use a few find/replace commands to strip out extra quotes. This is described in our knowledgebase at:

http://support.lexiconn.com/kb/index.php?ToDo=view&questId=149&catId=38

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