Many online marketplaces feature product catalogs that include thousands of products and hundreds of product categories. For this reason, Intelex module includes a powerful Product Import Wizard, which allows you to quickly populate your product catalog (database) by importing information from an existing product database or data file. We import all types of XML product description document or use data parser. We fetch products from online stores and upload them to the marketplace every day.

When you administer big marketplace database, any manipulations you need to make should be implemented quickly and effectively. Usually a series of new data have to be dropped in or updated, but manual human efforts are usually not enough. The more data are piled, the more difficult it becomes to find and manage them. Thus, placing goods to desired marketplace categories via import directly or simultaneously building properly-organized category tree is reasonable solution.

Recently we encountered the problem of mismatching between the product categories in the external online shop and existing product categories in our marketplace. Now we want to share the experience how we have solved this problem. Here are explained main functional opportunities Intelex software offers.

In case you have, let’s say, the online shop A with women accessories, which contains category “Bags”, where all kinds and styles of bags are presented. Our marketplace B contains subcategory “Sport bags”, and we want all the sport bags from online store A to be imported respectively to this subcategory. We have found the solution – before the import process we are searching for all the products in the shop A by the keyword “sport bag” (in the product title and/or product description field). All the products from the shop A with matching items will be imported to the marketplace B database with an appropriate category (which we indicate in category ID field). Marketplace category hierarchy is already created and we can see their IDs, so we can use them to link items to relative categories. To use category ID, categories should be created in advance. You cannot use ID to assign products to new categories.

Now you know the solution when you want to massively import products to existing respective marketplace categories. 

But what if the items you have to import belong to the new category, which doesn`t exist in your marketplace yet?

New categories appear in the online stores constantly, and these categories may not be presented at our marketplace yet. After the XML processing and update process new categories list with status “is new” appears. If the category with “is new” status is not presented in your marketplace yet, you can add it right during upload manually.

Intelex marketplace software empowers you with useful bulk product management possibilities and allows you spend less time on the procedures that lead to getting profit.