Best Way to Input Catalog data

Business
1

Hi there,

I am about to launch a brand new e-commerce site. Me and my associates have spent the best part of a year modifying Opencart to give us exactly what we need and although we have the ability to enter our product catalog live using the back office, my colleague seems to want to do it locally.

This is quite possible because Opencart allows you to dump the database into an sql file which can be downloaded and opened in a text editor. He wants to edit all of the products into the text file and then upload it to Opencart on our server. However, this text-file is confusing to look at and I tend to disagree with his method here.

Obviously, after the initial upload, when we add or edit existing products, we will always use the back office but I think his thinking is just how to deal with the sheer volume of our first-time-upload.

That’s why i thought I would ask the question on here to seasoned e-commerce store administrators. How did you do your initial catalog upload?

Did you do it all manually live, into the back-end or did you upload a complete database?

If you uploaded a database, which database editing software did you use?

thanks

Silversurfer

2

Ideally speaking, uploading via a database, RSS feed, etc. is the best way.

Realistically, for the limitations you mentioned, using the back office is often the easiest way. If you plan to have anyone in the future editing products who is oozing with tech savyness, you’re probably better going the back office route. However, if you’re dealing with thousands of products which need to be modified frequently, you’ll definitely save yourself a lot of time if you can do it more dynamically.

With that being said, is there no way to upload via a CSV or something which is more easily edited in a spreadsheet program?

3

Hi thanks for your reply,

I have looked into a few different options since reading it and have come up with software called ExcelMySqlConverter. It’s not free but I don’t think it costs much and what it allows you to do is hook directly into your remote DB, pull out the tables you need and saves them on your desktop in Excel format. Its exactly that I was looking for and very easy to read , it look just as neat as if it were in phpmyadmin.

Thanks for the suggestion

4

Do you already have the data elsewhere that you can export to the format you need?

If you do, that will be the easiest method by far.

If not, it seems like it’s just a matter of preference to me. I think using the back office would prevent mistakes and make it easier to do the work.

5

Hi thanks for your interest,

The easiest way to interchange data with OpenCart (our cms) is to download the .sql file to the desktop, make edits locally and then upload again. You would be surprised how difficult it is to find a good myql editor that allows you to just open this file locally, they all seem to want to tunnel to the remote DB. You can open it with notepad but it is almost illegible especially because our catalog is so complex. So it would appear atm that exporting to Excel is the way to go. This does however, require me to make a remote connection to get the file for export in the first place.