coda
01-13-2010, 07:15 PM
My dropshipper offers an inventory datafeed that I can d/l to excel every day. However, that feed is full of issues such as: Typos, small images, and obsolete retail prices which they aren’t planning on fixing any time soon. No, they aren’t fly by night. Too successful, too busy to be bothered with small stuff like that, I suppose.
I thought of offering less items and attempting to do the whole thing manually, by re-offering the same products each day and then I could have bigger images (the company has bigger images I can use, but for some reason simply does not have them available on their datafeed. Go figure). I can also clean up the typos in the descriptions, and collect true retail prices so customers would get a better sense of the discount they were getting from shopping with me.
The problem is I am bucking the business model and it has to be problematic. The biggest issue: I’ll be severely limited to the number of products I can manually check against the datafeed each day to be sure I am not out of stock on a product. How many products can I safely do this for each and every day? How can my business ever grow? I chose a business that has thousands of products and I am limiting myself to maybe a few hundred? My competitors will all have thousands. How can I compete? I don't see myself checking to see if thousands of items are in stock each day. That's not what I envision as a business owner. It would kill all the pleasure of the concept for me and I really don't want an employee and what a tedious job to stick somebody with!
My question is this: Is there any way I can make these changes and save them and still use the datafeed in an automated fashion. Is there some type of command I can use (I know nothing of programming!) that can overwrite the data in the datafeed that will allow for the larger image or the saved retail price etc.? Naturally, I would hire someone to do this for me, that is, program it one time.
Is there another solution, or am I doomed to be either a small insignificant site or another cookie cutter site with small images, old retail prices, and too many typos, that looks just like every other site that sells the same products?
Help me please!!!
I thought of offering less items and attempting to do the whole thing manually, by re-offering the same products each day and then I could have bigger images (the company has bigger images I can use, but for some reason simply does not have them available on their datafeed. Go figure). I can also clean up the typos in the descriptions, and collect true retail prices so customers would get a better sense of the discount they were getting from shopping with me.
The problem is I am bucking the business model and it has to be problematic. The biggest issue: I’ll be severely limited to the number of products I can manually check against the datafeed each day to be sure I am not out of stock on a product. How many products can I safely do this for each and every day? How can my business ever grow? I chose a business that has thousands of products and I am limiting myself to maybe a few hundred? My competitors will all have thousands. How can I compete? I don't see myself checking to see if thousands of items are in stock each day. That's not what I envision as a business owner. It would kill all the pleasure of the concept for me and I really don't want an employee and what a tedious job to stick somebody with!
My question is this: Is there any way I can make these changes and save them and still use the datafeed in an automated fashion. Is there some type of command I can use (I know nothing of programming!) that can overwrite the data in the datafeed that will allow for the larger image or the saved retail price etc.? Naturally, I would hire someone to do this for me, that is, program it one time.
Is there another solution, or am I doomed to be either a small insignificant site or another cookie cutter site with small images, old retail prices, and too many typos, that looks just like every other site that sells the same products?
Help me please!!!