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Exhibiting Your Products on ProductBlazer Using File Upload

The easiest way to get a large catalog (more than 25-30 products) of products onto ProductBlazer is to upload them as a delimited catalog file. Delimited files are easily exported out of most inventory or product management systems, spreadhsheets, and other common electronic repositories of such data.

What follows will help you understand the essentials for creating catalog files that not only upload without error, but also optimize the organization and display of your products. This improves the browsing experience for you potential customers on ProductBlazer and helps you sell more products.

Delimited Files

A delimited file is a text file that has a fixed number of fields, or data elements, per line. The fields are separated (or 'delimited') by some special character that tells you where one field ends and where the next begins. Common delimiters are the comma, tab character, and the pipe character ('|').

Typically delimited files have a 'header' line, which is when the first line of the file contains the names of the fields in the fields themselves. Thereafter, each line will correspond to a single product. For example, a simple comma-delimited catalog file with a header and two products might look like this: 

  ProductID, Name, Description, Price
  A123,Tiny Tots Bouncing Ball, A new way for your 2-year-old to have fun., 14.99
  B234,Princess Costume, Give your little lady her day at the ball., 24.99

Notice that each line has four fields, with commas in between. This works well, but what if you wanted to use a comma in your description fields without making it look like your line has extra fields? The answer is to use quotes for any field whose contents may include your delimiter character. Our file above could look like this instead: 

  ProductID, Name, Description, Price
  A123,Tiny Tots Bouncing Ball,"A new way for your 2-year-old to have fun, safely.", 14.99
  B234,Princess Costume, "Give your little lady her day at the ball.", 24.99

ProductBlazer supports commas, tabs, and the pipe character ('|') as valid delimiters for catalog files.

Creating A Delimited File

If you have your products electronically stored in some system (e.g., a spreadsheet file, an Access database, or some other system), chances are that system has an export feature. After selecting the products you want in your catalog, choose the export function and choose delimited or 'csv' as the export format.

If you don't have your products in any electronic form that can be exported to a delimited file format, your best bet will be to create the file by hand in a text editor. Be sure to save the file as a text file, and not something like a Word .doc file, .rtf, or other format.

Your Fields

All fields that you include in your catalog file will be captured by ProductBlazer and displayed on your product detail pages. The names you give your fields in the header record will be the labels that appear next to the data.

However, there are special fields that ProductBlazer needs populated in order to do basic presentation of the catalog and the products. During the catalog upload process you'll be given an opportunity to drag-and-drop map your fields into those required or requested by ProductBlazer.

ProductBlazer requires that you have data to map to these fields:

  • SKU
  • Product Name
  • Product Description
  • MSRP

ProductBlazer requests (but does not require) that you map data to these fields:

  • Manufacturer
  • Manufacturer SKU
  • Image
  • Category

Notice that these need not be the names you give the fields in your delimited catalog file. When you do the mapping ProductBlazer will keep track of your field names and its own.

Images

There are two easy ways to get your product images onto ProductBlazer if you are using a catalog file for upload. The first way uses HTTP, the standard web protocol. The second uses FTP, the standard file-transfer protocol.

If you have your images up on a website somewhere, it might be best to use the HTTP approach. In this case, the image field in your delimited catalog file will contain the web address (URL) of the image itself. For example, the following file has HTTP URL's in the image field: 

  ProductID, Name, Image
  A123,Tiny Tots Bouncing Ball,"http://www.abcsupplies.com/products/imgs/A123.jpg"
  B234,Princess Costume, "http://www.abcsupplies.com/products/imgs/B234.jpg"

If you don't have your product images on a website, but you do have them in a directory accessible via FTP, then the image field in your delimited catalog file should contain the path to the image file relative to your FTP root directly. For example, the same products above might have their image fields populated as follows: 

  ProductID, Name, Image
  A123,Tiny Tots Bouncing Ball, "/products/imgs/A123.jpg"
  B234,Princess Costume,"/products/imgs/B234.jpg"

When you upload your catalog file, you will be given an opportunity to specify whether the image values should be interpreted as HTTP URL's or FTP file paths. If you choose FTP, you'll also be prompted for the ftp address and login credentials.

Note that you can always leave the image information out of the catalog file and simply upload images manually in ProductBlazer. For best results, avoid loading a stock 'No Image' image when your product has no image. If you don't have an image for a product, leave the image field empty for that product in your catalog file.

Uploading Your Catalog File

After you have signed up for the appropriate exhibitor plan, you should have a 'Catalog' tab on your Account Summary Home page. This is the page you see immediately upon logging in with your user id.

Clicking on the 'Catalog' tab, you will see a link to add products. Clicking this link will bring you to the "Catalog / Add Products" page. Here you can add products manually on the left, and upload catalog files on the right.

Select 'Catalog File' and use the file browser to locate the catalog file on your local file system. Next, select the appropriate 'File Type', which will denote the type of delimiter you have used. Now press 'Upload File'.

ProductBlazer will upload your file and inspect it, paying particular attention to the header line. You will then be presented a list of your fields and a list of the fields ProductBlazer wants. To map your fields to ProductBlazer's, simply drag and drop your field onto a ProductBlazer field.

Notice the box on the ProductBlazer side of this page that says 'Category'. You can drag any number of fields to this field that might be used to slice and dice your products from a browsing perspective. Continue reading for more info on categories and their use in the ProductBlazer catalog display engine.

When you have mapped all your fields, continue to the next page.

If you mapped a field from your file to ProductBlazer's 'Image' field, you will prompted to tell ProductBlazer whether you want them retrieved with HTTP or FTP. If you choose HTTP, ProductBlazer will assume that the field you mapped to its 'Image' field will contain URL's to the product images. If you choose FTP, ProductBlazer will assume that that field contains full-qualified pathnames to the image files, one per product. It will also prompt you for the FTP credentials required to successfully log in.

Category Fields and Browsing

Most e-commerce storefronts and online catalogs use categories to organize and guide the browsing experience for their users. Toward this end, you can provide data fields that will be used by ProductBlazer to group your products into categories to guide browsing. Category fields allow your users to slice-and-dice your catalog and get to the products they want.

ProductBlazer allows you to designate any field from your catalog file as category field by dragging it to the 'Category' box during file upload. ProductBlazer will group products together that have like values in category fields. Each category field is a separate way for your products to be grouped, whether they are related (e.g., one is a sub-category of the other) or independent.

For example, suppose you have the following catalog file: 

  SKU, Genre, Platform, Product Name
  A123, Roleplay, Nintendo, "The Legend of Zelda"
  B234, Roleplay, SONY, "The Legend of Zelda"
  C345, Puzzles, SONY, "Rubik's Revenge"
  D456, Puzzles, Nintendo, "Brain Teasers"

Suppose you designated 'Genre' as your only category field. In your catalog, ProductBlazer will show two categories of products - 'Roleplay' and 'Puzzles' - under a set of links labelled 'Genre'. If a user narrows his view by clicking on the Genre 'Roleplay', ProductBlazer will display just the two "Legend of Zelda" games.

Suppose instead you designated both 'Genre' and 'Platform' as category fields. In your catalog, ProductBlazer will provide two sets of links for narrowing, one labelled 'Genre' and the other 'Platform'. If a user narrows his view by clicking on the Genre 'Puzzles', and then the Platform 'Nintendo', he will be presented with the single product "Brain Teasers".

Note that not all product fields work well as category fields. Category fields should have finite, discrete sets of values, each of which is shared by multiple products. Those for Genre might include only "Roleplay", "Puzzles", "Shooting", "Action", and "Children's". The values for Platform might only include "SONY", "Nintendo", "XBox", and "Sega".

Other types of fields that make potentially good category fields are: Brand, Manufacturer, Rating, Size, and Color.

Fields that would not make good category fields include: SKU, Price, MSRP, Manufacturer SKU, or any field that is likely to have a unique value for a given product.

Including Pricing Information

ProductBlazer requires that you populate an MSRP field. I.e., you must map one of your fields to ProductBlazer's MSRP field. Note, however, there's nothing to keep you from having all zeroes in your price field. You do not have to publish any prices on ProductBlazer if you choose not to.

However, MSRP is used as a way to navigate through your products. And if you'd like to also include your wholesale price, there's nothing stopping you from doing that. ProductBlazer will display the data with the label you give the field in your catalog file.

Common Causes of Upload Errors

Most problems with delimited files can be remedied by following this checklist:

  1. Make sure you have a header record that gives the names of your fields.
  2. Make sure you are consistently using the same delimiter character everywhere.
  3. Make sure you have the right number of fields on each line.
  4. Make sure you have quotes around text fields that might contain your delimiter character (short and long descriptions, product names, etc.).
  5. Make sure you don't have any newlines ('\r' or '\n') , tabs ('\t\') or other odd characters in your text fields. Newlines should only occur at the end of a product's line and nowhere else.

File Naming

It makes no difference what you name your delimited catalog file before you upload it. ProductBlazer will not be confused if you continuously upload files with the exact same name.

However, ProductBlazer does track and display to you the names of the files you've uploaded. So, if your filename has some special meaning (e.g., 'SpringProducts2007.csv') by all means keep them as they are. You will be able to see a history of the catalog files with the file name that you used, and you will probably find having your name useful.

Duplicate Products and Repeated Uploads

You can upload a file as many times as you like. Since ProductBlazer identifies products based on the value mapped into the SKU field, any products in a file that contain the SKU of a product already in ProductBlazer will be treated as an update to that product. You can update a product as many times as you like. If you upload a catalog file that is missing a product, that product will not be deleted from ProductBlazer.