Getting your shop online requires your product information to be well organised. Web Agent can prepare your product photos and information for your online store. But if you have time on your site and are able to use a computer, have a tripod and a good digital camera you can prepare your product for your eCommerce web designer.
To make the information easy to manage it will need to be placed in a Microsoft Excel spreadsheet. You could also use Open Office to prepare a spread sheet with all your online products information. Open Office is open source software so it is free. I will not get into too much detail about spreadsheets as it is beyond the scope of this tutorial, however I can tell you that using a spreadsheet to organise information will help you get organised. If you are not familiar with spreadsheets just look up “how to set up a spreadsheet” in Google.
Moving on. Your online store will feature all your products therefore it is important to be able to identify each product from one another. To do this you will need a column named “Product ID” in your online store spreadsheet. Your products will at least need the following details/columns to be put online.
- Product ID
- Product name
- Product description
- Product price
- Product photo
Apart from the above mentioned details you may also require product attributes. For example attributes for a car may include the following.
- Climate control
- Spoiler
- Fog lights
- Low profile wheels
- Sun roof
There are other dimensions to this but for simplicity sake we will leave it at that. If you need to discuss this further and would like Web Agent to help you with this please contact us for a local Melbourne web design quote.
So now that you know what details you need for each product it is time to start collecting them and typing them up in Microsoft Excel. Don’t forget to save your file after every product you insert. :)
Now you will need to take photos and relate them to each product. It is best to have a simple white background when you are taking the photos of your products for your online store. If you have problems doing this feel free to contact us and we can come to you and save you the time. Anyhow once you have set up your background you will need a tripod and enough area in between your tripod and white background to fit the whole product in the picture. Lighting is also important so if you can get your hands on some white light neon lights you will be doing your product photos a favour. Lighting up the front and the back of the product will give you a crisper shot. As you are taking the photos make sure you record the order you are taking the photos in so that when it comes to naming them it will be easy to do so.
To get the most efficient outcome when taking your photos it is best to take your photos in the order of your product numbers on your spreadsheet. This will help you in the next and final step. Once you have taken all the photos you will need to rename each one to the product id of the respective product. Once you have done this you will have a list of all the products details and a photo for each that has been cross referenced with the Product ID as the name of the image is the same as the product id. The other thing you can also do if you have the time and software is to optimise the photos. What this does is reduces the size of the photos to make them load quicker when people are browsing through your online store.
If you have done all these things you have taken the next step to having your online store ready for business sooner rather then later. Things generally don’t get done if they are left for later. :)
