Keeping Up with the Jonses?

[TMS Clint]

On average, how many people work on your web store? How many items do you have and how many completely optimized for search engines (keywords, meta-tags, content-rich description)?

I'm a one man show with roughly 1,500 items... and only a third of those are completely optimized. Some items I add by hand, others I add by extracting fields I need from my manufacturer's materials into a spreadsheet and bulk importing them. But on those: the descriptions are paltry, the images are just logos, and things like keywords and metatags are completely absent.

I have to admit, I'm having a hard time keeping up with my competitors. They are able to list more products with more complete information than I am. So, again, I thought I would ask the 3dcart community these questions:

1. How many people work on your web store?
2. How many items do you have?
3. How many items are completely optimized for search engines (keywords, meta-tags, content-rich description)?

What I'd like to figure out is if I'm just out-manned or if there's an easier way to do things I just haven't worked-out yet.

[brassandsilver]

Well, we are still small. I have three employees, and six independent contractors who work with me. Right now, our store has about 300 items, but we design, then have manufactured and import almost all of our own products, so all product specs, photography, and other info all has to be generated by us from start to finish.

We are fairly new to 3dcart, and are still working on getting everything optimized on the new platform. After working on this for two months we are maybe halfway there. It is a huge job.

The best method we have found for getting this work done quickly is by building custom export sets. We create an export that has only the required fields - catalog id, and product id, and then add just one or two fields that we want to complete. After exporting that to Excel, it is much easier to get all of the data entered, and then import that back in to our site. Then we move on to the next field. It is so much more efficient than trying to edit all of that in the admin. Still a never ending project, but it helps.

[watchdr]

Hi,

We are currently a one man operation on the shopping cart end. We did just hire a SEO company to help with that. But on loading new products:

I use Killink CSV which is a much better csv editor than Excell. You will find with Excell you are extremely limited on file size. I have about 1100 products online right now, Excell cannot handle the exported product list - it's too big. Because of interlinking products we need to know the product id of the product we are linking to and 3dcart is too slow and time consuming to go through the pages just to find this.

So I download the full file every 50 products uploaded to make sure I am right in my counting.

To make new products I upload all the information at once using the sample file from 3dcart. It is easy enough to put all the information in the fields in Killink CSV. I then work on an average of 12 items at a time. Once they are done I upload them and add images and options. Because of our products each one has different options so doing them through 3dcart is a little easier for me.

For a copy of Killink CSV do a google search. I think it is just $25 or so and it's only limit for files size is your computers memory. It works great for me.

Hope this helps.

Ken

[concession-supply.com]

How or why are these csv so big that excel won't handle them?
We have about 9,000 products and use excel on a daily basis without any issues.
Although our toal product file size is around 12MB we have downloaded and uploaded serveral times without issue (usually when making global changes). Do you have images or some other settings where the files are so much larger?
Just curious. :confused:

[watchdr]

No we don't have images included with the csv file. Our total file size is about 13MB right now but Excel can't handle it. Don't know why but once it got to about 8MB it came up with an error stating the file was too big for Excel to open.

It may have to do with our extended description field. Or the category list field.

Not sure but it was a pain when it happened and I had to look for something that didn't have limits.

Something is different for us. We have just over 1,000 products and a file size of 13MB and you have 9,000 products with a file size of 12MB.

Is your file a complete listing of products with all the fields? ending with the field 'filename'? Or is it selected fields?

I may have to see if 3dcart can look at our file and tell me what's going on.

Ken

[mondo]

1. How many people work on your web store?

One man and spouse occasionally.

2. How many items do you have?

Other store: 900 with attributed products listed as separate items (5 sizes 5 products).

3D: about 60 focused in one area and products are attributed (5 sizes one product).

3. How many items are completely optimized for search engines (keywords, meta-tags, content-rich description)?

Other store: All, we're #1-3 on most of our top keywords on Google
3D: most

We use excel for for optimizing. Very fast, but many, many of ours use the same keys. Copy and paste, still the only way to go.

[cannen]

I use Killink CSV which is a much better csv editor than Excell. You will find with Excell you are extremely limited on file size. I have about 1100 products online right now, Excell cannot handle the exported product list - it's too big.

We have 2 sheets each with about 35k items in them for a total of somewhere around 72k. We don't have every column because they aren't all needed. So, we are somewhere around 4-6MB each. We don't have a problem with excel handling that file size. It may be the version of excel you are using though.

Currently we have 4 stores with 3dcart. 2 of the stores have around 72k items. 1 store currently has about 23k and the final store has around 120.

I work on the site developing new products and getting support from 2 other people. 1 of those other people handles 3 stores sales and updates, the other person handles sales on 1 site.

We are not perfectly optimized but we do fairly well in the search engines.

I know that one of our competitors has 4-6 people working for them and has a mostly straight html store. They always have a ton of products out there and tend to get more business then us.

[TMS Clint]

We are not perfectly optimized but we do fairly well in the search engines.

I know that one of our competitors has 4-6 people working for them and has a mostly straight html store. They always have a ton of products out there and tend to get more business then us.

Are you casting out a net of items or are you targeting a handful of specific items? I think where my own frustration stems from is trying to compete with those competitors who have 4-6 people working on their site.

Like others in this thread, I bulk upload items by spreadsheet: copy and pasting the relevant information from the product books my vendors supply. However, I'm still sinking more time into optimizing each one for search engine marketing. Perhaps my time would be better spent throwing out that net and targeting key points of it to make strong.

Specifically, I need to stop creating unique meta tags for each item, and stop creating my own photos for them.

Thanks to everyone who took the time to respond!