Still Waiting....
Hello all. Where do the weeks go? This week has been slightly more productive than the last. I managed to squeeze a few more items out into the shopping cart. It's much faster than I am. I couldn't say that for the last shopping cart. Anyway, I'm getting pics from vendors, adding descriptions, keywords, weights.... and that magical marketing type sales description that engineers are really NOT good at. That's hard but I use the vendor's descriptions when I can. Why not? They've already gone to the trouble and they don't mind.
This week I exported and downloaded the entire database of products from PDG Commerce into a .csv file.... comma separated variable. Last year I didn't know what this was but today, its my best friend. If you're familiar at all with Excel, this is a good way to edit your products and categories without having to open each one individually in your shopping cart admin.
There is a hitch. If you have any commas or other punctuation in your product info, it will not be nice to you when you try to import it. Your first clue? When you do your export, download and open your file to start working, you will notice weird characters and descriptions. It replaces all of the stuff IT doesn't like with other stuff that YOU won't like.... kind of a jokester don't you think? How do you get rid of that junk? I did a simple find and replace and replaced the weird combo with something that will work... like the word "and" or whatever you want. This will keep your file from failing to import those items.
Its not quite as bad as I make it sound here but it will make your life miserable if you don't know what's causing your products not to import.... and you don't have a computer geek sitting in the same room to point out the seemingly obvious...:-) The PDG Commerce documentation warns you about this but unless you have time to read and absorb the entire manual, you may miss this detail.
So for now I'll continue to add more items as I can. You will see lots of new stuff this week. We have no company this weekend and no trips, just good quality time with my computer.
In the meantime, we'll keep checking for an order. I'm not surprised we haven't got any yet since we haven't done much advertising. It's a weird spot in the road right now. We want the orders but don't want to advertise for folks to come look at our "empty shelves". We'll get there.
Till next time,
Sandy
