It used to be complicated, but it isn't now.

If the question was "What do customers who want to start selling online fear the most", the answer would be "Getting their products into the shopping cart."  If you have hundreds or thousands of products, just the thought of getting all of them set up in the online store, categorized, priced, pictures associated, etc. is daunting.  Wouldn't it be easier just to make an Excel spreadsheet with all of your product information and upload it, and magically all of your products were online and ready for purchase?

Well, with Cartooga it is that easy.

Many shopping carts have some kind of "import utility" where they claim you can upload an Excel file and be done, but there is a big difference between theirs and ours.  For starters, they aren't really using a real Excel, they're using a CSV file.  CSV files can be opened with Excel, but the reality is the behind-the-scenes formatting is very different - and it's that format that the other guys' product import utilities are going to process.

Here's the trouble with CSV files - you have to create what's known as a delimiter, which tells the system where a column ends and the next one begins.  Usually these delimiters are a comma, but what happens when your product description contains a comma?  Now you have to change your delimiter to a quote and comma, which can throw off your HTML code.  The best solution we've found for importing CSV files was to use a double quote + comma delimiter, except there is one problem - Excel 2007 won't save with that delimiter, so you're back at square one.  And if right now you're asking yourself "what's a delimiter?", you can see why we think most of the existing product import utilities out there are pretty much useless.

When we designed Cartooga 2.0, we wanted to make it easy to get your products into the system.  So we created our own import utility, built right into the system, that accepts an actual Microsoft Excel .xls file - not a CSV.  This lets you organize your file the way you want, create column types and even calculated columns, and when you're ready you can upload it to our server and we'll create your products from your file.

And as far as the image handling goes, that process is really easy too.  The Excel file contains an Image column, which can work one of two ways - if your images are already online, enter the path to the image in this field (like http://new.cartooga.com/images/logo-cartooga.png) and our system will automatically fetch it for you.  Or, just enter the filename (ie; image_file_name.jpg) in the field.  When the import completes, you'll be taken to another screen where you can upload all of the images at once.  You literally just hit the upload button, select the folder on your system where the images are located, and upload the entire folder.  Our system will assign each image to the correct product and you'll be good to go.  All you have to do is give us your best, largest image and our Advanced Imaging component will do the rest.

We can also import non-product web pages, or an entire site.

So say you have this awesome website with 3,000 pages that you made in Dreamweaver and now you're wondering how you're going to get those pages into our system?  How about this - make a zip file of all of your pages, folders, upload it to our server through the Cartooga Store Manager, and instantly your content will be live on your site.  How cool is that!  It also has full override capabilities too, so if you make a change to a few pages in your favorite web page editor and want to re-upload them, just upload a new zip file containing only those pages and they'll overwrite the ones on our server.