Ideas for product creation work flow.

[ForcedFabllc]

Ok guys. I need some help or guidance. We are a fairly medium sized store with around 4K products. The problem is that I hand listed every one of those. It took me a year or two to do that. My competitors all have 10s of thousands of products. I can not for the life of me figure out how to scale this up or automate this task. This seems like it would be a fairly easy task, but I am very limited in my tech knowledge. What I am in the process of doing is having a web-scraper built for a few of our supplier sites. This will allow us to pull down data and save photos automatically. The out put of the scrapers are being built around our 3dcart CSV file so It should be pretty close to upload ready.

But I wanted to find a solution that does not require a webscraper for when I have data that is not in spread sheet form. Do any of you have a product creation software made to use copy and paste data to output a upload ready csv? I am thinking of having one writen up that has a simple user interface that can handle all the important inputs Product name, sku, manfacturer, prices, description, keywords, meta descrptions, title, possibly custom SEO friendly URL made from the product name, This would allow me to give the software to a outsourced VA and have them do data entry from our distributors websites that do not allow scrapers to run on them. I could then pay them to just copy and paste the manufactures descriptions which for 90% of our products will be good enough to get the products launched and then I will setup a schedule for them or myself to go in and make more unique ones. But having them do data entry directly into spread sheets is scary as I know I screw up more then normal when dealing with them .


What are some of you doing for this work flow?

Jon

[TMS Clint]

The unfortunate thing is that even if you get plenty of content from your manufacturers, your competitors have the same copy. Web crawlers will see it as "duplicate content" and you could lose significant search traffic when Search Engines decide there's nothing new or unique about the information on your site and bury it in the SERPs.

However, if your business doesn't rely heavily on organic search traffic, then it's probably not of much concern.

[ForcedFabllc]

Actually that has been a pretty talked about issue on another forum I am a member on and most of the people are in the 250K -2mm a year crowd and the general consensus among them is that when it comes to a Ecommerce store using manufacturers descriptions is not all that frowned upon by google. They are talking for stores where the need to have tens of thousands of products that if you are copying a manufacturer they seem to allow it and allow ranking, because there is only so many ways to present features and functions of the products.


I am risking alot on the duplicate content, but I would rather have 10K products with 1-2K unique content written products. where i feel I am losing out is when a customer wants to order most of his stuff from one supplier they search knowing exactly what they want by part number usually and they find it with me. now i may not have the next 3 items the competitors do so even though my content was better and price was a tad better on that product they goto another site because they have all the parts. Most people in my market already know what the product is and how and why it works so they they are looking for part numbers and good product photos so they know its exactly what they want. Many do not read descriptions.. I know this because i sell even stuff that is marked in bold red in the descriptions that its on back order and the ETA is 2-4 weeks out and people order and then email me next day wondering why their stuff isnt shipped. even though I emailed them and explained the back order. The customer just hunts orders and ignores all other things. Its a damn pain in my ass that so many do it.