Building Your Product Data

Any ecommerce website can only be as good as the information fed into it. Product data is a crucial part of making your website easy to use.

StoreBuilder uses the concept of Products and Product Variants. A Product variant is one unique version of a Product that a customer might purchase. A Product is a group of Product Variants that are generally regarding as the same thing.

To get started, lets look at how you might sell a t-shirt. If your store had a particular tshirt available in 2 colors and 3 sizes, that means their are 6 unique tshirts available for customers purchase (2x3=6).

Your product data excel sheet would now have 6 rows, 1 row for each tshirt product variant. Now you just have to decide what kind of part numbers or SKUs you want to use for this product and how the customer might choose which variant of this tshirt they want.

Product SKUs

Product SKUs can be any unique code or number that uniquely identifies a product. Some software packages just use a large numerical number such as 10002282. Other software packages may use an alphanumeric system such a TSHIRT-RED-SMALL.

While human readability is not required, it might be handy in some cases if the SKU gives you an idea of what the product is. That said we do want the SKU to be relatively short and often machine readable (able to be printed as a barcode for warehouse use or other automations).

We recommend a SKU shorter than 12-13 characters primarily for convenience reasons. If the SKU is very long it could be tedious to type or enter or say on the phone or remember. A SKU up to 20 characters could still be considered reasonable if well justified for a very large catalogue or a complex product where there is meaning embedded into each digit of the SKU to signify options. StoreBuilder will support a SKU up to a maximum of 32 characters.