Excel Databases
This service is mainly suited for web shops and catalogs. When there is a large number of products, it's really not viable to do numerous updates by administering them through the backend. Instead, having them all in a spreadsheet allows for a quick and easy bulk updates regardless of the number of changes. Having ran a few web shops since 2005 until recently, this has proven time and again to be a huge time saver. The same goes for a large book catalog site with over 5,000 items, where the same method is used for adding new, and administering existing products.
Use case
As a shop owner or administrator, you receive at least monthly price lists from your supplier or suppliers. In my case there were six, with 2,500 to 10,000+ products each, with a couple coming daily. The main shop featured just over 6,500 products. That's a lot of data to be checked, and you probably have something in place to process changes. What my method allows me to do however, is much more:
- keep track of changes in pricing and availability of products. All supplier price lists feed a single SKU table with all carried products, showing best and worse pricing for all items, and together with preset rules, is used for a base cost price for all items
- easily see new products in each suppliers' table
- easily add new products to the database in bulk, quickly do bulk updates as only tables with changes can be uploaded. Complete web shop product data is contained within the spreadsheet, with each segment having its own table. It follows the structure of the web shop database and its tables, allowing for easy maintenance
- easily add all new products at once
- keep consistent syntax along all product lines
- automatically add SEO for all products while new products are going up, and change it in bulk when needed
- do any change on any number of products at once (change category, pricing, manufacturer, stock levels and all other fields)
- automatically generate feed files for external services
- quicker co-relation of products and any custom fields
- and much more ...
I call it simply The Engine, and have built one for every shop and catalog I built and then administered long term. It's built and used by us only, and is an optional administration service we offer.
