What's new

It's been almost a year, so it's time for an update! 

PART 1/2

What the heck have I been doing besides playing golf?

To sum up:

• Inventory
• Website problems

Inventory

OMG, inventory. ugh. What I didn't plan on was having to type in all my inventory manually. Technically, I had my website company create an upload script for this. But after months of screwing around waiting for them to get it right, I ended up having to do it manually. 

Currently I have over 1500 unique items in my shop. This took approx. 6-8 months to get through.

That's a heck of a long time. What's so involved about putting in inventory you ask? 

1. Getting photo permissions.
   
   First you have to ask permission of the original owner for access to their picture archives. Not too hard, but often had to wait several days for this to get set up after filling out copyright statements, etc.
2. Trying to find the correct photo in their archive.
   
   With some companies this is a breeze. Unfortunately from the one company where I ordered approx. half of my items, neither the invoice nor the packing list contains the same item ID, which is used to catalogue the photos. They used their own original numbering system, which doesn't match up with the photo archives. That was genius guys, thanks.
   
   So I have to open their humongous ordering Excel sheet to find the item I'm looking for, then copy out the item ID used in the photo archives, then click through the archive and download the photo. It's all number based, so there isn't any way to find a product image unless you have the special item ID.
3. Editing photos.
   
   The pictures are rarely in the correct size or resolution. I will quickly run out of room on my website account if I'm uploading images over 4M for each item.
   
   In my colored partyware range, the manufacturer came up with a brilliant way to solve the hue differentiation problem that occurs when viewing colors on different monitors. Just offer one of each hue for the items that are actually all the same color when viewed in person:
   
   
   
4. Writing unique descriptions for each item.
   
   The tenets of SEO say that in order to get better scoring in search results, you shouldn't use the same description that you get from your supplier (or copy from your competition). This is why most of my items have bare bones descriptions. Having minimal descs and getting more items uploaded was more important than a verbose description.
   
   Plus this approach minimizes the chances for typos and grammatical errors in German. Writing the English descs is obviously much faster.
5. Filling out 17 tabs of information on every single item.
   
   Then switch languages and do again (ok, technically not true, since most of the information is inherited from the parent)
   
   
6. Lather, rinse, repeat 1500 times. 

OK, I'm exhausted from writing and I've still got more inventory to put in this week from my latest deliveries. And I'm excited about my putting in my Harry Potter / Hogwarts party set :)