IA Modules eCommerce Documentation

Importing Categories from a Spreadsheet

There is no tool to allow you to import your categories from a spreadsheet. We provide a tool in the Control Panel for managing categories.

Our staff members can import categories from a spreadsheet on an as-needed basis for customers with very long category lists. Time spent for category importation is billiable at the rate of $75/hr.

If you would like to request that our staff handle your category import, you will need to provide a spreadsheet in a special format as outlined below.

You can list the categories in any order, but they must be in this format:

Top level category name
Top level category name:second level category name
Top level category name:second level category name:third level category name

examples might be:

Dogs
Dogs:Beds
Dogs:Beds:Round
Dogs:Beds:Square
Dogs:Bowls

as so on....

Notice that the colon ( : ) character seperates each category name. You can have as many levels of categories as you wish. It is important to remember that these categories are used for navigating your products on your site, so you want to keep the number of levels at the minimum to avoid making the site hard to navigate.

You want to avoid special characters like apostrophes, quotes, ampersands. Ampersands have been working however since version 6.0 and should be acceptable.

If you make this in excel, when you save it, be SURE you do not have values surrounded by Quotes. You should save it as a CSV file and then open it up in notepad and scan/examine it.

NOTE 1:
99% of the time, despite any belief to the contrary, using the IAM Category Manager is faster and safer and easier. It is very common that clients state they wish they would have simply used the IAM Category Manager wizard to create the categories after realizing how easy it is to make typos and deal with excel to csv and corrections, etc. This is friendly advice, take it or leave it! :)

NOTE 2:
From our experience we can tell you this: online categories and pos dept rarely line up!!!
If they do, great. You did a better job of setting up your items than many QB users.
on top of that, you can only have one dept per item in qbpos. in iam you can have multiple and many people categorize items into one node with primary categorizer (which has sort by dept for fast multi selection and assignment in bulk to categories) and
the secondary categorizer which makes it easy to put same items into many more category nodes.

NOTE 3:
We will be adding new features to allow automatic generation of your categories from POS Departments and QB Financial sub items' parent item nodes.

We will also be adding a 'toggle on/off' feature to auto categorize and mark 'for sale = yes' based on these values. You should realize that you may have items to uncategorize due to this should you enable this feature.