Christmas 2019 is right around the corner, but maybe your e-commerce store isn’t looking too festive yet?
Not to worry – if you need some help decking the halls, we’ve done some research for you.
Shopify does come with its own feature for importation/exportation, but it lacks the automatic feel of some extensions. This is where Excelify, an app that allows the bulk importing and exporting of products in Shopify, steps in.
It allows you to control your store’s products from a spreadsheet such as Excel or Google Sheets, and exercise quick product updates during the holiday season.
What is the main benefit of using Excelify for a Christmas update?
You might be used to manually updating products within your store, and needing to set hours aside in order to import a new catalog. This takes valuable time that could be used on planning your store’s upcoming sales, or working on your marketing.
Excelify allows you to exercise greater control over your e-commerce store with its compatibility options. Instead of importing Christmas products one-by-one, you can create a file in any of the following main formats, as well as many more:
- Excel
- Google Sheets
- CSV
This file will contain the details of Christmas products you would like to import/update within your store, and Excelify will process the file in one piece. You can upload a file from many popular locations such as a standard web URL, Dropbox, Google Drive, FTP and SFTP servers.
How would Excelify use the file I upload?
As well as having the ability to bulk import products, you can update certain properties of your store’s catalogue. Perhaps you are importing Christmas variants on popular products? That would mean that you need to update the image to reflect the Christmas variant, for example.
The image below is an example of an Excel sheet that could be uploaded to Excelify, ready to update certain products in your e-commerce store for a Christmas event. Note that there are different columns, all of which are variables that can be updated in Shopify.
An important column is column C, the ‘Command’. This tells Excelify whether to update, delete or replace a product’s characteristic. For example, if you are updating a range of products in your store for a Christmas event, you would probably want to update your product’s title. Similarly, you will need to update your product’s image to reflect a Christmas theme. This is where the “image command” column comes in.
Replacing would mean that the entire product related to that product ID would be deleted and re-created, so be sure to use the update command when you simply want to change one particular field of a product.
Once the holiday season is done and dusted, you can delete your products’ Christmas variants by bulk using the command delete with the relevant Variant to get rid of them.
This ensures that only the Christmas variant is deleted, and your original product remains.
In short, Excelify uses the data in these sheets to prevent you, the store manager, from having to execute lengthy changes one-by-one.
Can I check the progress of an Excelify import?
Excelify makes it easy for you to run tests on imports, and check the live progress of any sheet you have uploaded.
Instead of importing a whole file, it is advisable to first import one of your product’s Christmas variant and check that it has been successful. You also have the option to cancel an import if you need to do so.
Excelify allows you to track the results of each item imported in real time, and find which imports have failed, if any.
Metafields and importing options
There is a great deal of flexibility when it comes to the fields you can update during an Excelify import. You can update products using the following common properties as filters, as well as many others:
- SKU
- Price
- Images
- Barcode
- Option values
Excelify also gives you the option to include additional columns in your uploaded sheet, called metafields. These can be likened to ‘notes’ attached to each product you are importing. Perhaps they describe the product, or give some more detailed information about properties such as size.
Attack the holiday season!
We believe that there is no better app on the market for bulk importing Christmas products than Excelify. Any other option would be extremely time consuming for any e-commerce store manager.
Excelify allows you to update your existing products into Christmas variants with ease, as well as import completely new products to your store.
There are plans ranging from a free plan to $200/month. As with anything, the more you put in, the more you will get out.
Of course, there are other data importing apps out there. However, we don’t think that there is a replacement for the value offered by Excelify – complete control over your Shopify store’s products from a spreadsheet!
